The American Scene dominated the nation’s art consciousness during the 1930s through World War II. Reflecting on art made during the Great Depression, art critic Peyton Boswell wrote in Modern American Painting (1940):

America salutes the past, and is grateful to Europe for the aesthetic problems it has solved for all nations. But to this technical knowledge we have now added something that is entirely our own – our own way of life, our own way of thinking and feeling, our own American spirit, if you want to give this something its most inclusive meaning. As a result, the world is witnessing the birth of a new school of painting – the American School.

Although many of its painters and printmakers were trained in Europe, the American Scene artists purported to reject French modernism and heeded the call to return to their hometowns and depict what they knew and considered to be uniquely American experiences. Primarily composed of two related styles, Regionalism and Social Realism, the American Scene was a representational, narrative-based genre concerned with the story of the United States through depictions of the rural countryside, urbanization, and human experiences of these landscapes.

The O’Brien Art Foundation and The Marty O’Brien Collection of American Art include key paintings and prints that represent the breadth and depth of the Great Depression and the economic calamity that both shook the country’s foundation and ultimately brought the nation together in a collective effort through renewal. Throughout the country, the New Deal afforded many artists the ability to continue their practices around American Scene themes despite the economic crisis. Thanks to these programs and the corresponding proliferation of local and regional museums, arts and crafts centers, and print organizations, the ranks of painters, printmakers, and artisans swelled to include more people of color, women, and regional artists outside of East Coast art centers. The result was a geographically and stylistically diverse body of work, which canvased both rural and urban America.

Contrary to conventional expectations of women to remain focused on domestic activities, many female printmakers, including Louise Freedman and Bernice Mandelman, used advances in color lithography and serigraphy (a process commonly used in the WPA poster sections) to develop scenes of American industrialization and the workers who participated in it. Chicago trained artist Dox Thrash was a Black artist who worked as part of the Federal Art Project Fine Print Workshop in Philadelphia where he helped pioneer the carborundum mezzotint technique using gritty crystals to roughen the printing plate and develop a rich texture on the image. Thrash used this medium for his Defense Worker (1941), which portrayed a worker in the heroic pose of a riveter in a military plant.

Bumpei Usui was a Japanese American artist who participated in the WPA’s Federal Art Project. In 1935, he joined the Easel Painting Division in New York, which provided nearly seven years of economic support, allowing him to continue as a practicing artist into the following decade when he painted Round Out, Old Section, Kingston, New York (1949). Usui was also an important frame maker, a significant consideration for the O’Brien Art Foundation, given its focus on presenting works in period frames as they would have been enjoyed at the time of their creation.

In line with depictions of labor, Richard Crist’s Workers Descending to The Mills on The Mon (1937) provides a haunting image of workaday life in Pittsburgh. Manuel Tolegian captures a more wistful moment in Sunday Morning (1940), with fishermen in the shadows of industrial storage tanks and the skyscrapers of New York in the background.

Industry was also a favorite topic for many American Scene artists beyond New York, into the traditional Rust Belt areas of the Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes. Dale Nichols’s Big City News (1935) is an iconic Regionalist work, which glorifies the American Midwest, specifically Nebraska, with its orderly and manicured composition. Along with works like Clyde Singers’s Springtime in the Valley (1936), Grading the Road, Nebraska reflects the Regionalist impulse to idealize and romanticize the rural environment of the United States as a land of prosperity and possibility.

The reality of 1930s American farms was often more dire. The environmental devastation and human toll resulting from the Dust Bowl also became a frequent subject for many artists working in the Social Realist tradition. Arnold Blanch’s The Farmer portrays an overall-clad man appealing to the heavens for rain amid a desolate and drought-stricken field, vastly different from Nichols’s idealized vision of Nebraska. Executed as both an oil painting and a more widely available, less expensive lithograph, Death on the Plains (1936) by George Biddle depicted a pair of cattle, one already reduced to a skeleton and the other emaciated and decaying in the open landscape of a once prosperous farm. Biddle is widely credited with catalyzing the creation of the Depression Era public art projects as an effort to give artists work.

American Scene painters were also interested in telling the stories of city dwellers. Two of the most important chroniclers of New York, Isabel Bishop and Paul Cadmus are represented by works that highlight the overcrowding of the city resulting from the waves of migration from the countryside and Europe during the prior three decades.

Bishop’s On the Street (1932) offers a view of the artist’s bustling 14th Street neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, while Cadmus’s Coney Island (1935) portrays a favorite playground of middle- and lower-class New Yorkers during the period. In another print, Wonders of Our Time (1936), Ida Abelman focuses on New York’s masses, in this case on the platform of the subway facilitating movement of hundreds of thousands of people across the boroughs. 

Although the Great Depression idled many factories, artists such as Carl Gaertner with works like Industrial Cleveland (Red) (1930) and Iva Goldhamer Stone’s Industrial Landscape (1941), turned their attention to the steel mills and iron forges of Pittsburgh and Cleveland, recalling the economic power of the United States, which did not regain its full footing after the Depression until production ramped up during World War II. Springtime in Pittsburgh (1939) by Clarence Holbrook Carter depicts a series of identical row houses typical of those inhabited by the working class on the eve of the War, the event which ultimately revived the country’s economy.