The characteristics that contributed in the 1930s to the fame of A Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, the three leaders of the Regionalist art movement, were the same that led to their being condemned as Fascists in the art criticism of the 1940s. Despite differences in their artistic styles, all three artists based their paintings in the 1930s on the life and land of specific locales in the Middle West. Each artist became associated with a particular region: Wood with Iowa, Benton with Missouri, and Curry with Kansas and later with Wisconsin. In their effort to celebrate the folk and tradition of these American regions, these artists relied heavily upon figurative styles and anecdotal narratives. They eradicated from their paintings the modernist styles such as Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism with which they had experimented in the 1910s and 1920s. Modernism, they now believed, was a difficult language, inaccessible to the ordinary public. Instead, these artists embraced a plain-speaking, folksy pictorial rhetoric.
Stephen Caffey. Review of "American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood" by Austen Barron Bailly.