America After The Fall

This title refers to an excellent exhibition currently on at the Royal Academy, of the modern art in the decade after the fall of the stock market in 1929. The social instability and economic anxiety factors greatly affected the artists in that prolific 10 year period with some excellent work from Edward Hopper, Alice Neel and Jackson Pollock. The key piece of the exhibition is American Gothic by Grant Wood, which can be seen on the banner in this scene. It is a well known painting, much parodied with everyone from Trump to the Muppets taking a place in that scene.

What was very interesting to learn is that under Roosevelt's Federal Art program which was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts, quite a few women artists were the recipients of this funding - quite progressive for the time.

Preceding seeing the exhibition there was a one hour lecture by the curator which was fascinating, and he explained how sometimes exhibitions centre around one main piece of art - in this case American Gothic - it is the first time that this piece of art has crossed the Atlantic - so we were lucky to see it.  

I forgot that it was another bank holiday weekend - no wonder the weather has been so cool!