The P-Word

by Beth E. Wilson, January 25, 2007

I recently attended a panel discussion at Cooper Union, organized by the New Museum. Titled “Location, Location, Location! Is Provincial a Bad Word?,” it was billed as addressing the “rise in importance of regional culture in the wake of global culture.” Those of you familiar with this column will recognize something of a hobbyhorse of mine embedded in this topic, so I was quite keen to hear what some of the smartest minds assembled in the art world’s ostensible capital had to say about it.

The whole thing was an utter disappointment, I’ve got to say. While there were glimmers from time to time of ideas connected to the subject, most of the presentations concerned pet projects or mindless, meaningless speculation about things that sounded relevant (but were not); not one of the eminent speakers assembled ever really dealt with the question of the provincial, provincialism, or anything close. By the end of the evening, it was clear to me that this well-connected brain trust was operating in its own weird vacuum, a feeling I’ve had more than once in recent years when encountering what might be badly described as the art world “mafia”—the establishment that organizes all the big international exhibitions, writes in the big art magazines, and helps to stratify the elite end of the art market. (Even the delicious irony of the panel’s title, referring to the oldest joke ever about real estate, seemed largely lost in its application to the speculative nature of the big money feeding the exclusivity of the art market itself.)

Using Harry Shearer’s apt term, the “News from Outside the Bubble” presents a very different picture. There are many reasons—real estate being an important one—that many artists have chosen to move out of the city, gravitating to the naturally beautiful yet still culturally connected villages and rural spaces of the Hudson Valley. But of course this is a very different place than it was when Thomas Cole and his 19th-century confreres first came to paint here, and even from the early 20th-century heyday of the Woodstock arts colonies.

Back in the 1920s, the response among many American artists to the bold, formal, and often abstract innovations of the Europeans (think Picasso, Mondrian, et al.) was to reassert the importance of more traditional representation, in a movement known as American Scene painting. These works sprung from the socially concerned work of the Ashcan School, and eventually grew into the new, often politically conservative style of Regionalism, which rejected the suspect polyglot culture of the urban centers, in favor of representing something more purely “American.”

The artists working in and around Woodstock, for the most part, tended to pursue a variant of this sort of American Scene painting (although with more liberal politics, on the whole), and a number of excellent examples of this work from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s will be on view starting this month at the Woodstock Artists Association. “American Scenes: Images of Leisure and Entertainment” is the second installment in a series of exhibitions organized by the WAA, highlighting the representation of everyday American life by artists from the area.

“Provincial” is not quite the right word to describe the Woodstock artists of that era—then, as now, the connections to New York were too close, too accessible to be ignored. Many artists participated in the community here only during the summers, others shuttled back and forth to the city as they pleased. What they shared, for the most part, was a commitment to easily legible representation, rejecting the farther flung theories of abstract art, a bias that emerged in the 1930s as the style made popular by New Deal-sponsored public art (which is also on view this month in an excellent show of government sponsored mural art drawings, “For the People,” at Vassar College).