America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s Hardcover – July 19, 2016 by Judith A. Barter (Author, Contributor), Sarah L. Burns (Contributor), Teresa A. Carbone (Contributor), Annelise K. Madsen (Contributor), Sarah Kelly Oehler (Contributor) (Art Institute of Chicago )

A unique look at America’s quest to carve out an artistic identity during the Depression era

Through 50 masterpieces of painting, this fascinating catalogue chronicles the turbulent economic, political, and aesthetic climate of the 1930s. This decade was a supremely creative period in the United States, as the nation’s artists, novelists, and critics struggled through the Great Depression seeking to define modern American art. In the process, many painters challenged and reworked the meanings and forms of modernism, reaching no simple consensus. This period was also marked by an astounding diversity of work as artists sought styles—ranging from abstraction to Regionalism to Surrealism—that allowed them to engage with issues such as populism, labor, social protest, and to employ an urban and rural iconography including machines, factories, and farms.

Seminal works by Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O’Keeffe, Aaron Douglas, Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis, and others show such attempts to capture the American character. These groundbreaking paintings, highlighting the relationship between art and national experience, demonstrate how creativity, experimentation, and revolutionary vision flourished during a time of great uncertainty

About the Author

Dr. Judith Barter is the Field-McCormick Chair and Curator of American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of many books and exhibitions including Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman (1999), Edward Hopper (2007), Window on the West: Chicago and the Art of the New Frontier (2001), Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago (2009), and American Art In the Age of Impressionism (2011), and two major collection catalogs, American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (1999), and American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago (2009). She was selected by the New York Times as a notable American curator (1999), was selected by the Chicago Tribune as "Chicagoan of the Year" for the arts in 2005, and has appeared on the NBC Today show and on PBS. Dr. Barter has held a senior fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, and has received the Distinguished Scholarship award from the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts. Her recent publications include For Kith and Kin: Folk Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2012) and her upcoming exhibition and publication, Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture and Cuisine (2013) will look at American still-life painting and the symbolism of painting American foods.