Around the time of the nation’s bicentennial and the opening of the Gallery’s East Building, several paintings by the major proponents of American regionalism were donated:
- Albright, Ivan
- Avery, Milton
- Baer, George
- Bellows, George
- Benton, Thomas Hart
- Bluemner, Oscar F.
- Bruce, Patrick Henry
- Curry, John Steuart
- Davies, Arthur B.
- Davis, Stuart
- Dearth, Henry Golden
- Dodd, Lamar
- Douglas, Aaron
- Dove, Arthur
- Emmet, Lydia Field
- Glackens, William
- Hartley, Marsden
- Henri, Robert
- Hopper, Edward
- Jonson, Raymond
- Kent, Rockwell
- Kuhn, Walt
- Kuniyoshi, Yasuo
- Lebrun, Rico
- Luks, George
- Marin, John
- Marsh, Reginald
- Maurer, Alfred H.
- Myers, Jerome
- O'Keeffe, Georgia
- Pène du Bois, Guy
- Pippin, Horace
- Prendergast, Maurice
- Sheeler, Charles
- Sloan, John
- Soyer, Raphael
- Steichen, Edward
- Tucker, Allen
- Weber, Max
- Wood, Grant
- Zorach, Marguerite
- Show all works
- The Aero
- Anne with a Japanese Parasol
- Artist and Nude
- Bather Seated on Rocks
- Berlin Abstraction
- The Bersaglieri
- Bizarre
- Blond Figure
- Blue Morning
- Both Members of This Club
- Buildings with Snowbank, Cliffside, New Jersey
- Café du Dôme
- Cape Cod Evening
- Catharine
- Chester Dale
- Christmas Mail
- Circus Elephants
- Citadel
- The City from Greenwich Village
- Classic Landscape
- Club Night
- Corn and Winter Wheat
- Cows in Pasture
- Dryad
- Edith Reynolds
- Elizabeth Virginia Laning Bradner Smith (Mrs. George Cotton Smith)
- Family Group
- The Fire Boss
- Flecks of Foam
- Florence Sittenham Davey (Mrs. Randall Davey)
- Forty-two Kids
- George Cotton Smith
- Green Apples and Scoop
- Grey Sea
- Ground Swell
- Hallway, Italian Restaurant
- Hare and Hunting Boots
- Harriet Lancashire White (Mrs. Edward Laurence White) and Her Children, Sarah and Laurence
- Haying
- House with Dutch Roof
- Imagination
- Immanuel Church, New Castle, Delaware: Close View
- Immanuel Church, New Castle, Delaware: Distant View
- Indian Girl in White Blanket
- Interior of the Fourth Dimension
- Into Bondage
- Jack-in-Pulpit Abstraction - No. 5
- Jack-in-Pulpit - No. 2
- Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3
- Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV
- Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. VI
- The Judgment Day
- Landscape No. 5
- Landscape with Figures
- La Rue de la Santé
- Le Tournesol (The Sunflower)
- Life on the East Side
- Line and Curve
- Little Girl in White (Queenie Burnett)
- The Lone Tenement
- Luxembourg Gardens
- Madison Square, Snow
- Maine Woods
- Marie Jane Hughes Marin (Mrs. John Marin)
- Masouba
- Maud Murray Dale (Mrs. Chester Dale)
- Moon
- Moth Dance
- Mountain and Meadow
- Mount Katahdin, Maine
- Multiple Views
- My Family
- New Road
- New York
- Nude with Hexagonal Quilt
- Nude with Red Hair
- Olivia
- Peinture/Nature Morte
- Pierrot Tired
- The Politicians
- Pumpkins
- The Ragged One
- A Railroad Station Waiting Room
- Rush Hour, New York
- Salem Cove
- School Studies
- Shell No. I
- Sky with Flat White Cloud
- Smokehounds
- Snow in New York
- Space Divided by Line Motive
- Stars and Dews and Dreams of Night
- Study for "Swing Landscape"
- Sweet Tremulous Leaves
- Tennis Tournament
- There Were No Flowers Tonight
- Third Street, New Castle, Delaware
- Trail Riders
- Tunk Mountains, Maine
- Untitled: Circus
- Variations on a Rhythm--U
- View from the Green, New Castle, Delaware
- Volendam Street Scene
- The White Clown
- Winter Landscape
- Winter Road I
- Winter Valley
- Wisconsin
- The Written Sea
- Yeats at Petitpas'
- Young Woman in Kimono
- Young Woman in White
- Zinnias
Building the Collection: Regionalism and Folk Art
![Wood_NewRoad Wood_NewRoad](/content/ngaweb/research/online-editions/american-paintings-1900-1945/american-modernism-and-the-national-gallery-of-art/regionalism-and-folk-art/jcr%3acontent/parmain/textimage/image.img.jpg/1474575295641.jpg)
Fig. 1 Grant Wood, New Road, 1939, oil on canvas on paperboard mounted on hardboard, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Irwin Strasburger
![Zorach_ChristmasMail Zorach_ChristmasMail](/content/ngaweb/research/online-editions/american-paintings-1900-1945/american-modernism-and-the-national-gallery-of-art/regionalism-and-folk-art/jcr%3acontent/parmain/textimage_0/image.img.jpg/1474575963236.jpg)
Fig. 2 Marguerite Zorach, Christmas Mail, completed 1930, inscribed 1936, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of the Zorach Children
During the teens, many artists, critics, and dealers, in their search for a distinctive national form of modernism, began exploring an indigenous source of inspiration that seemed to exist beyond the influence of the European avant-garde and outside the traditional canons of high or fine art: American folk art. The modernists’ ongoing fascination with folk art was later evinced in two distinctive collections that came to be housed at the Gallery. The Index of American Design, a compendium of 18,000 watercolor renderings of American decorative arts from the colonial period through the late 19th century, was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration beginning in 1935 and accessioned by the Gallery in 1943. Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch’s collection of more than 400 paintings and drawings of American folk art was accessioned by the Gallery between 1953 and 1980.[2] Modernist painters saw folk art as an authentic expression of American culture rooted in the past and, simultaneously, as a valid source of inspiration for contemporary art apart from any specific historical associations it might have. Because of this duality, folk art dramatized in powerful ways the complex relationship between past and present that was one of modernism’s most salient characteristics.
![Pippin_Interior Pippin_Interior](/content/ngaweb/research/online-editions/american-paintings-1900-1945/american-modernism-and-the-national-gallery-of-art/regionalism-and-folk-art/jcr%3acontent/parmain/textimage_1/image.img.jpg/1474575922816.jpg)
Fig. 3 Horace Pippin, Interior, 1944, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Meyer P. Potamkin, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art
In the Gallery’s collection, this paradox of being both in time and out of time, insider and outsider, is found in the work of the painter and quilter
Notes
[1] See, for instance, Erika Lee Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago, 1991); James M. Dennis, Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry (Madison, 1998); or Wanda Corn’s essay “Grant Wood: Uneasy Modern,” in Grant Wood’s Studio: Birthplace of American Gothic, ed. Jane C. Milosch (Cedar Rapids, MI, 2005).
[2] See Virginia Tuttle Clayton et al., Drawing on America’s Past: Folk Art, Modernism, and the Index of American Design (Washington, DC, 2002); and for the Garbisch Collection, see Deborah Chotner, American Naïve Paintings (Washington, DC, 1992).