American Expressionism

During the Great Depression and up until the beginning of World War II, the American Expressionists received considerable support from the fine arts programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the historic government agency founded by the Roosevelt administration. After the war, however, a new - and apolitical - movement, Abstract Expressionism, quickly displaced the topical expressionism that had preceded it. In this book, author Bram Dijkstra argues that the new movement was deliberately fostered by conservative government and corporate interests as a way of suppressing the socially active idealism that had flourished during the Depression. In this new climate of opinion, the representational work of the Expressionists was ridiculed by powerful critics, savagely denigrated, and wrongly linked to Regionalism, Socialist Realism, and even the art of Hitler's Third Reich. Ultimately, it was dropped from serious discussions of American art.