How to go
What:
“Regional Dialect: American Scene Paintings From the John and Susan Horseman Collection”
When: Through Sept. 4
Where: Springfield Museum of Art, 107 Cliff Park Road (closed Mondays)
Admission: $5; free for members and students age 18 and younger; free for all ages on Sunday afternoons.
More info: (937) 325-4673
Special event
At 6 p.m. July 22, Mark Chepp, the museum’s director emeritus, will present “The Larger Scene,” a look at regionalism and its historical context.
SPRINGFIELD — Guys like John Dillinger robbed their banks.
Guys like Joseph Vorst painted the walls of their post offices.
Of the two — bank robbers and muralists — that tore through the dusty towns of the heartland during the Depression, one came to be seen as a champion of the downtrodden.
Which?
Well, once again, art doesn’t pay.
The Midwestern artists whose work glorified an honest day’s work have been almost criminally overlooked since the end of World War II as suburbia began to engulf pasture.
The “scene painters” who often documented a way of life in its twilight — plowing fields with horses; picking cotton in the South by hand — might have achieved at least a level of infamy had they been branded public enemies for painting many fine examples of public art.
In the end, and maybe worst of all, they were just forgotten.
“I would contend this represents the real America,” said John Horseman, a private collector of the art known as regionalism. “There’s nothing wrong with Jackson Pollock, but how many of us can relate to what was going on in his mind?”
About half of Horseman’s collection — 57 regionalist paintings spanning the turn of the 20th century to 1945 — can now be seen at the Springfield Museum of Art through Sept. 4.
With the June 18 unveiling of two restored murals at the Springfield post office commissioned in 1936 as part of FDR’s New Deal to honor the city’s manufacturing and publishing legacies, the touring exhibit has arrived locally with impeccable timing.
But that isn’t the only coincidence.
With its focus on historical American art, the Cliff Park Road museum would’ve been a perfect fit for “Regional Dialect: American Scene Paintings From the John and Susan Horseman Collection” regardless of anything else.
Museum Director Angus Randolph is calling it one of the museum’s “first premier shows in a long, long time.”
Come to find out, though, John Horseman is a 1976 Wittenberg University graduate.
A financial adviser in St. Louis, the Elyria native and his wife began collecting art only eight years ago.
“My wife always says it’s because I couldn’t coach Little League anymore,” John Horseman, 56, joked recently. “I needed something to do.”
The Horsemans felt themselves drawn to American art from the years before World War II — paintings of the rural and urban working class during the Depression.
“It’s a period that’s close enough that we can relate,” John Horseman said. “I’m a big believer that you have to learn from history. As a nation, we can look back at this and learn from it.”
Besides, the abstract work of Pollock and his contemporaries is “prohibitively expensive,” Horseman said.
“It’s just something we got caught up in,” he said. “I certainly enjoy the hunt of trying to find things.”
After the war, abstract expressionism became so popular so quickly that the realism of the regionalists was left to rot in the art world’s corncrib.
Horseman has even made a couple of his finds in junk shops.
As the U.S. grew more sophisticated after the war, Horseman said, a certain way of thinking prevailed among the nation’s tastemakers in New York.
“Who cares about guys in farm fields or factories?” he said.
“So much of this art came from the middle of the country,” Horseman said, “and was looked down upon. Here comes abstract expressionism, which was centered in New York. That dwarfed everything else.”
There was no way that a place like Stone City, Iowa, was going to be allowed to be recognized by folks out East as any sort of artistic center.
And so the regionalists championed this huge, fertile stretch of land of ours now dismissed as “flyover space.”
You might not recognize such names as Joe Jones, a St. Louis painter and muralist, but Horseman is betting that you someday will. “There’s a good probability that they will be elevated,” he said.
This nearly forgotten period of American art — partially forgotten, he suspects, because that time between the world wars wasn’t exactly the happiest — is being rediscovered.
“These are artists who deserve this recognition,” Horseman said.
Take a guy like the German-born Vorst, who painted his way around Missouri.
In the 21st century, look no further than Wikipedia to determine whether someone has fallen into obscurity.
The vast Internet encyclopedia, with entries on everyone from Ant-Man, the diminutive comic-book superhero, to Maharaja Sir Rajinder Singh, the first Indian to own a car, has no mention of Vorst at all.
In his day, though, he painted and exhibited right alongside his friend, Thomas Hart Benton.
Those few regionalists who remain well-known — Benton of Missouri, Grant Wood of Iowa and John Steuart Curry of Kansas — were also the ones profiled by Life magazine, according to Horseman, on the phenomenon of artists painting the people and places of everyday America.
“I wish,” is Horseman’s stock answer when asked if he owns anything by Wood, Benton or Curry.
Everyone else was systematically forgotten when the likes of Pollock came to rule American art.
“This was thought of as homespun and corny,” he said.
But you know what?
Pollock himself was born in Cody, Wyo.
Now that’s some prime flyover space right there.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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