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3 : The Dust Bowl Era T he severe economic hardships being faced by the American art world in the Depression engendered a kind of artistic protectionism in which the life of American art depended on the degree to which modern European art was suppressed. As a result, a large proportion of artists during the 1930s were more interested in painting direct, understandable images of local scenery, everyday events, and popular myths than in producing abstractions or other modernist exercises. They rallied around the stalwarts of the American Scene—Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton—whosestylizedlandscapesofshrillcolorsandcadenced contours presented a sentimentalized nineteenth-century view of America that idealized life on the land. Benton, in particular, roamed the country for months on end in the hopes of grasping rural America’s earthy vigor. Taking cues from the “people’s art” of the Mexican muralists, Benton created an indigenous art in which he paraded sharecroppers, railroad workers, cowboys , and cotton pickers, their sinewy figures exaggerated to the point of caricature. Determined and hardworking, but largely disassociated from the strikes, breadlines, and slums, Benton’s Americans were perceived by his critics as decorative emblems. At the same time, Texas’s mainly pastoral way of life was being subsumed by a society characterized by commerce and speculative enterprise. Just as usage of the land changed and its physical appearance modified, so too did artists’ perceptions of the land turn away from historical and impressionistic responses to more literal, if not vivifying, interpretations of its natural features. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, artists not only depicted ways in which the land serviced certain industries , such as farming, cattle, and oil, but also portrayed the often-devastating effects of those industries on the local environment . In the isolationist temperament of the 1930s, the the dust bowl era 63 are my favorites by emulation—Leonardo, Titian, El Greco, Gozzoli, Botticelli—but certainly not as ones to be imitated.” How the approaches of Hogue and fellow Dallas artists differed from their predecessors depended on the ways in which each artist identified with the region. Still, by purging sentimentality and “picturesqueness” from their work, the artists were free to express nature’s essential physiognomies with greater clarity and sensitivity. At this point, Hogue’s strengths are obvious: intense individualism; an awareness of twentieth-century Modernism , but with a firm determination to create a personal style involving the landscape; precision of execution; and complete absorption in his creative vision. Of all the artists who came to maturity during these years, Hogue is rightly the preeminent figure who consistently captured the look and feel of the land, in addition to the psychological character the land projects.4 As much of the work so powerfully reveals, however, the ultimate subject of Hogue’s painting was as much himself as the world around him. His vision of the people, land, and events of his time was always informed and shaped by the complexity of his own experience and emotional life. It is in this synthesis of observation and intuition, fact and poetry, that his fullness lies. “Five senses she gave me, my mother, that is,” Hogue wrote. “And she gave me as well my jaw, my mouth, my nose, my forehead , my strength and later my drive, my determination, my stout heart and perhaps genius, if there is any; but a sense of color, a sense of words, a sense of sound, these must be contrived by me alone out of elusive hidden senses that throb within my being. I wade deep into a lonely mire of emotion and I am curious to feel for the very bottom of it.”5 This contemporary mood of elegy in Hogue’s work exudes a sense of frailty of human life in the face of nature’s vast forces. Indeed, Hogue’s landscapes are imbued with a sense of awe at the expanse of space, a humbling sense of something sublime lying beyond the grasp of human capacities. Hogue experienced firsthand what was arguably the worst ecological disaster in American history. When a severe drought struck the Midwest in 1931, farmers had been churning up the Great Plains for more than half a century. Without native grasses to anchor the topsoil, fields crumbled to dust. Through deliberate misuse—after plows had stripped nativist attitudes of the American Scene movement reached a fever pitch. Taking advantage of the new social conscience awakened by the Depression, Benton and the vitriolic critic Thomas Craven espoused the cause of...

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