By Jessica Skwire Routhier

CHADDS FORD, PENN. — Visualize, for a moment, the ideal of autumn in America. Apple trees laden with fruit, trees aflame with color, squirrels skittering about, fields turning golden in the equinoctial sun. Somehow our fall visions always tend toward the rural. But fall is also election season in America, a season that comes with a very different kind of optics. One inescapable image in recent years has been the color-coded map of the USA, with Republican-leaning states in red and Democratic ones in blue. This shorthand way of categorizing us was popularized in the 2000 presidential election and has been used exhaustively for every election since.
Americans have become accustomed to viewing our nation in this disunited way. We have also, as a whole, accepted the apparent truism that divisions in political thought fall along rural/urban lines. The city and the country are wholly different worlds, one is led to believe, with different values, ideas and, it goes without saying, inhabitants.
And yet like most truisms, this one does not stand up to extended scrutiny. In the context of American art, it clearly falls short of the truth, for artists have historically divided their time between the cities that provided a market for their work and the rural areas that often inspired it. “Rural Modern: American Art Beyond The City,” at the Brandywine River Museum of Art through January 22, explores that point of intersection in the 1920s through the 1940s, a time when many Modernist artists were leaving their hometowns for the big city (even if their rural roots continued to inspire their work), just as others were quitting the city for the vistas and tranquility of the hinterlands.
Co-organized by the Brandywine River Museum and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the exhibition will be presented in an expanded form at the High Museum as “Cross Country: The Power of Place in American Art, 1915–1950,” February 12–May 7.
“Curators are often asked what their favorite paintings are,” notes exhibition curator, and Brandywine River Museum associate curator, Amanda C. Burdan. “One of my favorites has always been Charles Demuth’s ‘My Egypt.’” That Precisionist view of grain elevators near the artist’s hometown of Lancaster, Penn. — painted from a low vantage point so that the smooth, metallic cylinders recede into the sky — neatly encapsulates the blending of city and country that was such a feature of early Modernist painting in America.
We tend to think of Demuth as a New York artist, says Burdan, but in fact he had deeply rural roots and was just as connected to Lancaster as he was to the city. “He returned to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, after having all these amazing cosmopolitan experiences, and [he] applied these concepts he was exposed to” in the work he created while living in his family’s Eighteenth Century farmhouse. The covetable “My Egypt,” unfortunately, is not in the exhibition, but other Pennsylvania works like “End of the Parade, Coatesville, Pennsylvania” convey Demuth’s fascination with what happens when the Machine Age meets the farm.
As Burdan began to look deeper into Demuth, she realized that, among his Modernist contemporaries, “I couldn’t find a single artist who had only worked in the city.” The practice of living and working in many different kinds of places brought artists multiple benefits. “They could bring more Modern styles to smaller art colonies,” Burdan says, “and then they could also adopt the rural themes and subject matter to their paintings in Modernist styles.” Subjects like grain elevators, freshly plowed fields, sugaring-off parties and, in the Southwest, buttes and adobe dwellings, were exciting to artists, critics and collectors on a purely visual level. Beyond that, however, such elements were also embraced by many as a way for Modernism, which had come of age in Europe, to develop a uniquely American idiom, flavored with this country’s distinctive landscape forms and cultural traditions.
In the period between the two world wars, the issue of American identity — and the ways in which it played out in aesthetic platforms from art and architecture to fashion and film — took on a sense of heightened importance. “In the art world the wars were very significant because it meant that the beacons of Paris and Europe were shining less brightly,” Burdan explains. “Those art capitals were closed to Americans,” and this meant “America had to learn to operate without its ‘other.’”
The impulse to codify — or even to create — a “real” national identity is also apparent in the literature and journalism of the time, much of which draws a line, in Burdan’s words, between “what’s decadent and European and [what’s] wholesome and American.” (Something like this can be seen in the work of N.C. Wyeth, a star of the Brandywine’s permanent collection, who not only illustrated scores of books, but also created easel paintings of the Brandywine River Valley and coastal Maine.) The impulse to cast an authentic America against a debauched Europe echoes our current propensity to draw a bright line between the rural and the urban. This show, Burdan says, is the first sustained effort in an exhibition format to track and trace this phenomenon.
At the Brandywine Museum, the show is organized into three main sections. The section devoted to landscape reflects the breadth of the show’s geographical content, from New Mexico landscapes by Stuart Davis and Marsden Hartley to a view of Lake George, in upstate New York, by Georgia O’Keeffe. Burdan notes that earlier this year, the Brandywine River Museum presented an exhibition of Hudson River School paintings (“The Poetry of Nature: A Golden Age of American Landscape Painting,” March 19– June 12, 2016), which explored similar themes of nationalism through art and landscape in the work of an earlier generation.
The continuity of that idea into the Twentieth Century is also evident in paintings from the section that is dedicated to “the spirit of work,” including Dale Nichols’s “Spring Turning,” Grandma Moses’s “Bringing in the Maple Sugar” and Thomas Hart Benton’s “Tobacco Sorters,” all representing iconic American industries that are yoked to the land.
The third and final section of the show, which Burdan is calling “American Gothic,” deals with some of the grimmer realities of the time. Both Charles Sheeler’s disorienting “Staircase, Doylestown” and N.C. Wyeth’s “Drowning” are marked by absences, by people who are not there. Such paintings are stand-ins for the real desolation that many Americans were facing at the time: racial and ethnic violence, financial ruin, homelessness, war and drought.
“Brandywine’s multilayered mission means there is also an opportunity with this show to point out some of the environmental issues that contributed to this dark period in United States history,” notes Burdan, referring specifically to the mismanagement of land that led to the Dust Bowl. Paintings like John Rogers Cox’s “Wheat Field,” in which a single, ominous cloud casts a shadow on a glowing, golden field of grain, directly address such concerns.
“American Gothic” by Grant Wood was one work that slipped through the grasp of the exhibition’s curators. Wood’s famous painting was committed to a different exhibition dedicated to this time period, “America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s,” which recently closed at the Art Institute of Chicago and will travel on to venues in London and Paris — the first time “American Gothic” will travel outside the United States.
The Brandywine and Chicago shows are just two among many major exhibitions this year dealing with the interwar years in America. Others include exhibitions of women Modernists and nonrepresentational portraiture at the Portland Museum of Art and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, respectively; a Grandma Moses retrospective at Shelburne Museum that casts her as a Modernist and very much an artist of her time; “Grant Wood and the American Farm” at Reynolda House Museum of American Art; and a Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective at the Tate Modern in London. While acknowledging that this confluence of efforts has brought the competition for loans to a fever pitch, Burdan notes, “it’s really encouraging to realize there are other institutions and curators and scholars working on the same time period and concepts.”
She feels they all share “a sense of looking back to something that may have been ignored,” specifically the idea that Modernism, rather than being a unified movement centered exclusively on the world’s art capitals, may in fact have consisted of “multiple Modernisms,” some of which embraced the rural.
The co-collaborators at the High Museum, of course, have also been part of this community of scholars. Burdan praises the particularly valuable contributions of Katherine Jentleson, the High’s curator of folk and self-taught art. The High Museum exhibition will be organized not thematically, but geographically, reflecting the organization of the catalog, with sections dedicated to the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic, the Southwest, the West, New England and the South. It is a useful organizing principle, says Burdan, but the exhibition’s organizers have also been careful to temper such regional distinctions with the observation that artists were highly mobile during this period in history, more so than ever before. In her words, “No one is just a Southwest artist.”
Illustrating this, each section in the exhibition begins with an infographic: a map of the United States and a listing of each artist represented in that section, with lines connecting each name to the multiple places where he or she lived and worked. The effect is to show a concentration of activity in, for instance, the Midwest, while at the same time underscoring that these artists were connected to other places as well and that artistic influence traveled alongside them, in both directions.
In the exhibition space at Brandywine there will also be another, related graphic that Burdan describes as a “mapless map,” including the names of towns where all these rural moderns worked.
“They look like dandelion seeds flowing away from this central place of New York City,” Burdan says. “It’s a visual reminder that this art is spreading.” It is also a notable contrast to the rigorously demarcated blues and reds of this year’s electoral maps — and a persuasive argument that “Rural Modern” is both timely and relevant.
The Brandywine River Museum is at 1 Hoffman’s Mill Road. For information, www.brandywine.org/museum or 610-388-2700.
Jessica Skwire Routhier is a writer, editor and independent art historian based in South Portland, Maine.