Explores representations of the American Heartland

...The gentle hills of the landscape swell like ripe breasts, the gullies suggest vaginas...

...In Curry's painting, the woman is fine-boned, neat, with simple hair...

...Words like politics and ideology don't quite seem right for many of these images, not so much because they lack evident politics but because they position themselves in a region where shared values come before politics, in time and in significance...

...A perfect bit of Americana, or so one thinks before moving on to the next painting...

...Their tonalities are moody, dramatic like Gordon Parks's Frisco Railroad Station, Fort Scott, Kansas (1949), a photo taken at night and printed to look it...

...Illusions of Eden" suggests that the strength of these representations lies in the rural and agrarian, in the work of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and the others...

...the fields define the seemingly limitless space, and puffy clouds fill up the all too vast sky...

...Heartland is, of course, an old and unobjectionable metaphor for the Midwest...

...Their heads, bowed against the wind, NOTEBOOK are covered in old hats and cloth caps...

...They sit in their parlor on either side of a window that looks out at their barnyard...

...Courtesy Columbus Museum of Art...

...The iconography is precise: his gaze is outside the house toward the farm...

...looking at the Burchfield, one feels the slush on the streets seeping into one's boots...

...the visit to the barbershop where the artist paints himself as the customer (Aaron Bohrod, The Haircut, 1936...

...The paintings in "Illusions of Eden" are rarely as contained, as vignette-like as Norman Rockwell images of small-town America...

...Several generations later, I am reminded as I look at these paintings that the biggest factory in the state of Ohio, where agriculture still dominates the state's economy, is the Honda vehicle factory in Marysville, some twenty miles northwest of Columbus...

...Ostermyer, Wife of Homesteader, Woodbury County, Iowa (1936...

...John Rogers Cox's Grey and Gold (1942), offers the signature image of "Illusions of Eden...

...If it's hard to imagine any exhibition devoted to a sense of place without these five motifs or others much like them, that should be a warning that there's a whole lot of mythmaking going on in this show...

...Each has a connection to the region, either by birth or residency, but each also belongs to a larger contemporary culture of art that is avowedly global rather than programmatically regional...

...That scene, a vignette painting within the larger painting, displays all of the cherished icons: barn, silo, animals, windmill, blue sky with puffy clouds...

...They do not speak, but one senses that they hardly need to after all the years...

...The word also sets to the periphery all images of urban life because they bear no reference to this sense of Eden...

...And that may explain why some of their paintings are so awful, so inadvertently like caricatures...

...Her husband is aging but still powerful...

...Looking at these art photographs (as distinguished from those taken by anonymous photographers for commercial agencies) reminds one of the time when people trusted in the unmanipulated veracity of the black-and-white photo image, when it still seemed to distinguish itself with that documentary power from painting...

...It was recently built on what had been open farmland...

...Taken generously, and that is the region's proper measure, the Midwest extends west to Kansas and Nebraska, south to the border states along the Ohio and Missouri rivers, north to the Canadian border, and east to the industrial cities of Pittsburgh and Buffalo...

...Looking at these paintings one sees why any left-wing collective politics, any true socialism, was unlikely to succeed in the United States...

...And even that institution rarely figures in these images...

...Nichols celebrates the independent agrarian life of the well-maintained farmstead...

...But they are not, finally, why the Midwest still speaks to the American imagination...

...One strategy of these painters for avoiding Russell Lee The Hands of Mrs...

...most of their painters were after something much larger and more resonant: rendering the Midwest as the heroic and archetypal landscape for the greatness of American life...

...But today, small-town America wants factories because that's where the jobs are, as private farm after private farm gets sold to agribusiness...

...In basic, though not explicitly ideological terms, these are political paintings...

...Historically, it was the railroad that connected the rural and the urban Midwest in the nineteenth century, and not surprisingly it figures throughout the images collected in this DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 95 NOTEBOOK show...

...Those who made these phoDISSENT / Fall 2000 tographic images resisted any comforting sense of the past, and thus could register the hardness of the present...

...Nichols works in glamorous Nordic ice-blues that freeze the scene...

...In so many of these paintings, what's missing is the color of dust, the sense of earth being carried by the wind...

...Set back in the upper corners of this painting, hidden in the shadows but still visible, are an electric fan and a wall telephone...

...Some of the painters seem to have read F. Scott Fitzgerald's reference to the "green breast of the new world" at the end of The Great Gatsby too literally for their own good...

...Emerson Burkhart paints another junkyard in 1947, but it's also more charming than sinister, despite its clever title: Fragmentary History of the Iron Age...

...I, for one, am deeply grateful that this painting was not included in the show because its iconic status makes it hard to look again at the Midwest...

...Here the locomotive crosses at grade level while the vehicles and pedestrians move beneath it through an underpass...

...It is hard to look at the sentimental pictures of neat farmsteads after you have thought about what Russell Lee captures in a simple image of a woman, shown only from her knees to her middle torso: The Hands of Mrs...

...There seems to be no place to gather, to share a sense of common identity, other than the church...

...In the near foreground, the fields are cut neatly into four by a crossroads with telephone poles bearing election posters for the local judge...

...Once he left the Midwest, Fitzgerald knew enough to keep it as a metaphor...

...In that sense of the city as both Renaissance invention and modern industrial zone something gets seen that changes the way one looks at a site as common and as unmythic as Booth's title: Washington Avenue and Milwaukee Railroad Bridge (1936...

...Kitsch is kitsch at least in part because it tries very hard to remove the element of surprise or shock or even just of seeing anew...

...his farmer stands proudly as he drives his sleigh into the barn...

...That may be why there is so much text, especially interviews, devoted to these four in the catalog...

...The Honda plant seems a monstrous intrusion on the landscape, as if dropped from some alien planet on small-town America...

...What Morris and Lange show in their photographs is the starkness and scale of the place in which successful human habitation seems almost a miracle against long odds...

...Nichols shows us a winter farmstead with a man riding home on a horse-drawn sleigh...

...Driven by this ambition, they took as their subject either the fecund landscape of the rural Midwest or its cities, where the produce of the landscape was converted into manufactured goods...

...It shows a darkening, roiling mass of storm clouds (the gray of the title) moving across a landscape of perfectly aligned, almost razorsharp fields of grain (the gold...

...Thinking about some of these paintings and their attempts to render an earthly paradise, this use of illusions almost seems a careless slip for "allusions...

...Or to American political history...

...Through this kind of printing, the photographers, especially those who worked for the Farm Security Administration, gave the Midwest their own version of mythic status...

...The difficulty of looking at Midwest by Midwest, as well as its irony, is that Curry could be a nostalgic painter himself...

...John Steuart Curry's Wisconsin Landscape (1938-39) and Adolf Dehn's Late Autumn in Minnesota (1948) are two examples of this domestic paradise: cozy, contained, comforting, delineated, protected...

...The contrast between the two paintings is hardly fair, because if Nichols is a competent portrayer of the scene, Burchfield drafts his townscape to show the poverty, the exhaustion of industrial life in the Midwest...

...As an adjective, Midwestern is inescapable because of the ways Americans move about while retaining the markings of place...

...In paintings of the Midwest, kitsch is most likely to appear when the painter tries to freeze a moment from the past for the self-satisfied pleasure of the present—Bohrod's self-portrait in a barbershop mirror is a good example...

...Chicken shit turns out to be just as poisonous as industrial effluvia...

...From these questions, it follows that it must also be contested territory in terms of how it gets represented visually...

...The only thing that looks like it belongs in Kansas is the chicken in the foreground...

...they are almost never the agitprop monsters of socialist realism, but they rarely fit their surroundings as persuasively as do people in Constable or Millet...

...Or, by another gaze: rigidly fixed, monotonously rectilinear, claustrophobic...

...Within that territory, the Midwest is both rural and urban, agrarian and industrial...

...Most of the paintings and photographs in "Illusions of Eden" were done between 1920 and 1940 by artists who were born or lived in the Midwest...

...The world has changed, but to see it one has to look in the corners and not at the stereotypical image at the center of the painting...

...in 1935, Aaron Bohrod paints Skokie Park Auto, a junkyard scene almost as pleasing to the eye as any of the pastoral landscapes in the show...

...The heartland remains, though, in the Midwest, because we need something to balance bicoastal America, where we have come to believe the new and exciting happen...

...Aside from some of the landscapes, these images show very little sense of sexuality...

...at their most manipulated, they usually yield kitsch...

...Each walks alone, isolated...

...And yet, that is where the Midwest gets continually evoked, rebuilt, celebrated, and betrayed in one suburban community after another...

...Slippery though it is, values is the right word because it points to a shared moral sensibility and helps to catalog the social rituals that become occasions for belief: the Sunday dinner eaten outside on the porch (Clarence Holbrook Carter's Let Us Give NOTEBOOK Thanks, 1943...

...It's hard not to 96 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 see this as a piece of war propaganda: the abundance of the land in its fecund goldenness will survive the blackening clouds of war...

...IN THE MIDST Of these pure products of the American Midwest, one wants to find images that make one see for the first time what one has looked at or driven by thousands of times...

...Separate the one from the other, and the place slips from view and becomes a series of clichés...

...Buffalo belongs because for generations it milled that grain...

...There isn't a painting in this show that can match the historical testimony of this photograph or its dignified and beautiful modesty...

...Now, several generations later, that sense of Eden seems less an illusion than a delusion as the traditional province of the independent American farmer becomes yet another big industry, one as capable of fouling the environment as any big city mill was in the 1930s...

...Grant Wood's Spring Turning (1936) manages to combine both in ways that might surprise viewers who know him only from his American Gothic (1930...

...Eden is the garden that each man, and the gender reference is deliberate, must remake for himself somewhere in that broad region of America...

...Partly it is because the factory buildings here have the narrow windows and two-dimensional solidity of city buildings in fifteenth-century Italian paintings, and partly it is because Booth registers the ways in which trains changed the topography of modern cities...

...For the photographers, all of whom worked 98 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 in black and white, the matter of color takes a different form because they tended to print their photographs with strong contrasts: the shadows run to deep black, the buildings, like prairie churches and grain elevators, to a stark white...

...But Curry has more to say about the life of his parents...

...the Bohrod and Burkhart just prettified...

...Unlike New England, which is a culture of six identifiable states, or the South, which at the very least includes the states of the Confederacy, the Midwest shifts from gaze to gaze...

...NICHOLAS HOWE teaches English at Ohio State University...

...At their most forthright, they can read as clichés...

...Burchfield evokes the tonalities of early photography, black and white with a sepia wash, so that he seems almost to paint in soot...

...Don't give the viewer any comfortable place to stand, any consoling gesture of prettiness...

...The parents are beautifully figured Midwesterners of a certain age, far more convincing than the dead-looking couple in Grant Wood's American Gothic...

...they meant their work to be big, heroic, a visual match for Carl Sandburg's poetry...

...None of them seems true to its moment: the Wood looks prettified and anachronistic...

...For painters and photographers as various as Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Burchfield, Aaron Bohrod, Cameron Booth, Nathan Lerner, William Sommer, Gordon Parks, the railroad matters...

...And for all that we today are right to see through such claims about photography, we also lose something: the way these images were meant to stand against the candy-box colors and easy cultural clichés of the dominant aesthetic...

...or his The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover (1931), a painting as strange to contemplate as its title suggests it would be, one year before Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president...

...That is also why the black-and-white photographs, especially those taken by known photographers but also some of those taken by anonymous employees of commercial studios, speak so directly and feel so much less burdened by unearned sentiment...

...Another, yet more mysterious image is Dorothea Lange's brilliant photograph On the Great Plains, near Winner, South Dakota (1941) which shows three white churches built on the open prairie within several hundred feet of each other—and nothing else...

...Sometimes this scale leads to a certain crudeness in their work...

...The photographer and writer Wright Morris puts it exactly: "I saw the American landscape crowded with ruins I wanted to salvage...

...In this show, the later a painting dates in the period, the more kitschy it can seem because its distance from the portrayed scene is all the more obvious, as is its desire for it...

...Ostermeyer, Wife of a Homesteader, 1936...

...If decadence can refer to a knowing, even cynical use of exhausted artistic forms, then these are decadent paintings, despite their utterly wholesome images and themes...

...THE IMPLICIT opposition in Cox's painting is between the agrarian Midwest and all that lies outside...

...As a kind of postmodern coda to the main body of the exhibit, there are pieces by four contemporary artists: Maya Lin, Kerry James Marshall, Malcolm Cochran, and Mary Lucier...

...The men he depicts are tired, faced with a long walk home uphill at the end of their shift...

...Whichever way, the railroad figures as the serpent in this Eden, the machine that joined this garden to the rest of the world...

...They give us ironic, coded gestures toward the Heartland, and in that sense can seem provocative and engaging...

...The landscape belongs to those who cultivate it in neat, self-contained parcels...

...DISSENT / Fall 2000 • 99 NOTEBOOK the trite or kitschy is to adopt, as sophisticated and trained painters, the gestures of American primitivism...

...Morris's own image of a water pump in the middle of the main street of Manchester, South Dakota, suggests just such a ruin, and serves as well as a reminder of the mysterious tenuousness of life in the heartland...

...Burchfield's is gray, painfully precise, suffused with a sense of solidarity for those it depicts...

...In his essay for that catalog, Robert Stearns explains that the show was structured around "five motifs that reverberate within the region: journey (history and mobility), garden (land and topography), home (family and community), work (labor and industry) and word (knowledge and belief...

...Even now, clichés inevitably gather about this painting as one tries to describe it...

...So it may, but NOTEBOOK that's only one version of the Midwest...

...A few of these painters, arguably the greatest of them (such as Burchfield), saw another landscape of deprivation and desolation, both material and spiritual...

...Burchfield gives us the working-class neighborhood of a small industrial town (Steubenville, Ohio) as workmen trudge home up a long hill late in a winter afternoon...

...Landscape painting after landscape painting in this show works by turning the Midwestern topography into a patchwork quilt...

...sharpen the focus until it hurts to look...

...That it displays this inescapable connection between rural and urban, agrarian and industrial is the great strength of the exhibition of paintings and photographs mounted by the Columbus Museum of Art...

...These lucid, informed images by Lee, Lange, and others call into doubt the muted, even off-putting title of the exhibition: "Illusions of Eden: Visions of the American Heartland...

...For in the years since World War II, that's where America from sea to sea made its spiritual Midwest, as it sought to escape the urban for the pastoral...

...Most of the painters in the show, from the famous ones such as Wood and Benton to the lesserknown ones such as Lois Ireland and William S. Schwartz, have a mythic sense of the place that affects their palettes...

...Kansas and Iowa belong to the Midwest because they grow huge quantities of grain...

...Anyone who thinks of the Midwest as a dull, grayish place will be surprised by the ways its own painters colored it...

...Its elusiveness makes it interesting, and also necessary...

...His melodramatic Tornado over Kansas (1929) shows a family heading for the storm cellar as a twister nears: the lovely mother looks madonna-like with baby in arm, the father Michelangelesque in his muscles, and the three children groomed to model for Norman Rockwell...

...they tend to favor a rather garish range of colors: the landscape is saturated in color but so are the town buildings and the clothes people wear...

...Curry's Wisconsin Landscape took first...

...Sometimes, these paintings can surprise, can force one to look again and again...

...It is a cautionary lesson against those painters who depicted the Midwest as a bastion of the old values...

...the promenade through the commercial district of Canton, Ohio, in front of Grants The Economy Store (Clyde Singer, Street People, 1936...

...It's another form of idealization, this vividness...

...There is no green breast of the landscape here, only the residential outskirts of a drearily satanic mill town...

...She knits as she sits in her wicker rocking-chair...

...The quilt metaphor here is exact because these images domesticate the landscape...

...These images belong to a community in which values are more fundamental than any explicit politics...

...If nostalgia is the sickness that comes of being separated from home, then this show might be called in the strict sense of the term nostalgic...

...Certainly, these values translated historically into a formal politics, usually of a conservative Republican variety interspersed with pockets of progressive or populist sentiment, but they also lent themselves to conventionalized depictions because they were the common currency of the place...

...Yet they also seem to have learned a great deal from their predecessors about the aesthetic dangers and costs of a too literal regionalism...

...His painting is the precise visual counterpart to Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Oklahoma!— another wartime myth about the American heartland as a place of fertile corn "as high as an elephant's eye...

...If that makes their contributions in some ways more interesting than those of the artists from earlier generations, it also tells us something very different about the Midwest—a story about coming and going, not about staying...

...The buildings in the Nichols have sharp, straight rooflines untouched by weather and the weight of the snow...

...With that simplification, it misrepresents the place...

...the day is turning dark despite the weak, yellow glow of the streetlight...

...Some of the artists in this show painted as if they were pretty close to Eden, but most of them would probably have joked that if Eden is an idea, the Midwest is the real thing...

...THE FOUR contemporary artists invited to participate—Maya Lin, Kerry James Marshall, Malcolm Cochran, and Mary Lucier—have a more abstract and attenuated relation to the Midwest than did Benton, Curry, Bohrod, Burchfield, and the others...

...Taken as printed, in the context of this show, the word seems wrong because it suggests that the curators feel superior to the images, or more knowingly sophisticated...

...But almost none of them seemed content simply to produce images that could be taken in at a glance and approved of with a quick smile...

...about portraying the Midwest after knowing the capitals of the world...

...But why "Illusions of Eden...

...WHETHER URBAN or rural, the painters worked on the large scale...

...When a great deal of painterly skill goes into rendering these images in color, they slip all the more easily into kitsch...

...Its images, virtually all dating from the 1920s-1940s, depict a world that even in those years was slipping away...

...Looking at the Nichols, one doesn't sense the cold of the winter day, nor should one, because it is winter pastoral...

...Consider John Steuart Curry's The Old Folks (Mother and Father) (1929), a portrait of his parents on the edge of old age...

...the family reunion with women tending the tables and men lounging under the trees amid their cars (Virginia Cuthbert, Schellhammer Family Reunion, c. 1938...

...admit the extremes of black and white, of radical difference...

...That reticence is another of their values...

...Burchfield depicts workers making their way home, lunch pails in hand, after a long day in the mill...

...his hands speak of long work on the farm...

...That is why it persists in the American imagination, why it belongs to our idiom for talking about the way people live and have lived in this country, regardless of their address...

...People in their landscapes often seem too big, too ennobled by muscles...

...the tree-planting ceremony at the schoolyard on Arbor Day (Doris Lee, Arbor Day, c. 1941...

...Midwest by Midwest...

...Eden is an even older metaphor for America as a place of born-again, second-chance fertility...

...To complete the scene, Curry has their dog standing with his front paws on the window sill so he can look out...

...The green or gold of the fields in so many of these paintings is less a shade taken from nature than a color meant to glut the eyes...

...Only in the photographs, especially those taken for the Farm Security Administration by Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Ben Shahn, do human bodies seem to fit into the scale of the scene in which they move, live, and work...

...It is, almost entirely, a show of work by natives looking at their home place...

...the hillside houses in the Burchfield sag under the snow, the downward pull of gravity, the sheer hardness of life...

...They were after something more than magazine covers...

...A more honest title for the show would have been, as one contributor to the catalog almost suggests, "Field of Dreams," because, baseball movie and all, that would have located this show's sense of the Midwestern idyll in fields and landscapes, in dreams that were more sustaining than illusions...

...An itinerary of Middle America and Mittel Europa makes for an interestingly trilingual catalog, a gentle corrective to those who might think the American Midwest embodies the provincial...

...hers is DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 97 NOTEBOOK domestic and interior, fixed on her knitting...

...The Currys may be Midwestern to the core but that includes keeping up to date with the modern conveniences...

...she has kept a certain elegance about her...

...Their relation to the Midwest seems more allusive than direct, more a matter of work for this show than the preoccupation of their career...

...Sometimes it seems a mechanistic intrusion on the farm pastoral, sometimes the means by which the bright and ambitious escaped small towns for the metropolis, sometimes a reminder in cities of the countryside that supplied them with raw materials for their industries...

...It might not be a more accurate title for the Midwest as a region but it would capture the intent of this exhibit more honestly...

...it does not belong to the old rustbelt Ohio of Youngstown, Cleveland, Akron, Toledo...

...There are thus strange moments of temporal disjunction: in 1939, Grant Wood paints New Road, a depiction of a road that has just been cut through a pristine farm landscape as if it were a hundred years earlier...

...Nichols's painting is cold, icy, solitary...

...In a simple painting by Cameron Booth of a railroad bridge with steam locomotive passing on it above a city street with cars, trucks and pedestrians, one gets this seeing anew...

...Image after image celebrates identity rooted and sustamed by the agrarian life of the individual farm...

...Titled "Illusions of Eden: Visions of the American Heartland," it will travel over the next year to Vienna and Budapest, as well as Madison, Wisconsin, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota...

...DISSENT / Fall 2000...

...I. i OOKING AT THIS show makes one see the Midwest again as contested territory: Is it a rural paradise, an Eden, an idyll...

...Such photographs said, strip away the color that glosses over so much...

...To judge from this exhibit, at least, the Midwest was not a place much represented by outsiders...

...the skill of the technique emphasizes the lack of scrutiny or questioning in the image...

...To evoke the doubleness of the Midwest one can turn to a pair of paintings with almost identical names and radically different visions: Dale Nichols's End of Day (1935) and Charles Burchfield's End of the Day (1936 - 1938...

...He is dressed quietly in overalls and a suit jacket, a rolled newspaper rests in his left hand but he looks out the window at his farm...

...Is it a place of hard industrial production in factory towns and cities...

...And taken by itself, it's also the tritest...

...Many of these paintings celebrate fertility in the most obvious ways...

...Illusions of Eden could almost be the name of a new suburban development...

...The depression created a world of objects toward which I felt affectionate and possessive...

...This is especially evident in Grant Wood's work, such as his Adolescence (1940), a representation of a young male chicken flanked by two large hens...

...That image gets the eerie or uncanny sense of the Midwestern openlands better than any of the overripe landscape paintings in "Illusions of Eden...

...Whose illusions...

...Values are hard to represent aesthetically...

...In fact, the catalog notes that Cox won Second Medal in the "Artists for Victory" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1942 for Grey and Gold...