Reeds

I am trying to stay cheerful during lockdown by continuing to focus of some positives - a comfortable home, my own, personal Intensive Care doctor, plenty of food and drink, the opportunity to have a good walk each day, plenty to read, lots of music readily available and films to watch. If I stop to think about all the things I miss - live music, sport, cinema, theatre, travel, restaurants, pubs and, above all, the ability to see friends and family - I become more gloomy.  And then I look at the rising reinfection rate in the North-West of England and the deep incompetence and dishonesty of Government and...

...so, in the 1920s and 30s, many artists in Europe and America resisted the trend towards abstraction and developed new styles of figurative painting, often concentrating on rural and urban landscapes, depicting the ways in which ordinary people lived their lives.

The classic example of this from America is Grant Wood's American Gothic (1930) clearly an influential painting if one can judge that by the sheer number of theories about it, many of them wrong. It is often said to portray a married couple. In fact the people posing for the picture, outside a house in Eldon, Iowa, were Wood's sister and their dentist and they were intended by Wood to be a father and daughter. Some Iowans objected to the picture, thinking it portrayed them badly - as the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported: "pinched, grim-faced and puritanical." However, others thought it showed a resolute, calm and determined spirit in the face of adversity.  I like it for those ambiguities.

Another American realist was Georgia O'Keefe, whose distinctive style ranged over many subjects from close-ups of flowers, animal bones in the deserts of Arizona and skyscraper buildings, such as Radiator Building, Night (1927).

Edward Hopper is also world famous for his scenes of isolation in Eastern USA cities, such as  Nighthawks (1942) Room in New York (1932) and Portrait of Orleans (1950).

Amongst British realists, the most easily recognised is LS Lowry, whose paintings of urban scenes in and around Manchester are similar to the works of Feininger and Klee in the geometric way they show buildings but made even more delightful by the crowds of small figures, wrongly characterised as "matchstick men" when they are all individual and show telling details. A fine example of this is Coming out of school (1927). A life-sized statue of Lowry stands at the bar of one of my favourite Manchester pubs, Sam's Chop House.

Spanish artist José Gutiérrez Solana, influenced by Goya, painted grim scenes of urban life.  In The Clowns (1920) he used sombre colours and an oppressive setting to depict two entertainers with bleakness behind their greasepaint.