Regionalism, to lift a few words from the exhibition brochure that accompanies work by Roger Medearis on view at the Huntington in San Marino, was “an American artistic movement during the 1930s and 1940s that rejected European abstraction, took subjects from everyday rural life and conspired to bring art to a wider audience through public art commissions and low cost reproductions.”
The most famous example, and an iconic painting that everybody has seen, is Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” with its weathered Midwestern couple in front of a white farmhouse. Wood was part of that triumvirate which also included Thomas Hart Benton (most famously) and John Steuart Curry, which is not to say that any of these fellows were good buddies who hung out together.
Roger Medearis (1920-2001) also squares up as an American Regionalist, but one who falls just beneath the waterline of name recognition and visibility. As a youth he lived in Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas, enrolling in the Kansas City Art Institute in 1938 where he came under Benton’s tutorial wing. Although an earlier influence was Norman Rockwell, some viewers may still perceive Medearis as Benton recycled.
Elizabeth (Betty) Medearis, the painter’s widow, donated almost one-third of the roughly three dozen works now on view at the Huntington in what is a small, concise and tightly-focused exhibition. One can pretend shock that art this good has largely been overlooked, but these homey genre scenes depict places that many artists – their eyes set on Paris or New York – wanted to escape. Later on, fed up with abstraction, it’s understandable that eventually these or other artists would cry “Enough!” – and then want to crawl back to their native roots. That’s the art world for you, pal; a pendulum swing this way, then that.
But why the initial backlash? Even though the work was sort of the painterly equivalent of Aaron Copland – “Fanfare for the Common Man,” “Rodeo,” “Appalachian Spring” – it soon became too reminiscent of the social realist pictures, depicting toilers of the earth increasingly favored by fascist and communist regimes. I’m not sure how it affected his contemporaries such as Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis and Charles Burchfield, but with the tide of American Regionalism going out in the latter ‘40s Medearis quit painting and joined the corporate world, where he worked as a traveling salesman.
It wasn’t until a dozen years later that he took up the brush in earnest, perhaps realizing – apart from marriage, of which he had three – that art was his first love. This is not to say that Medearis tried to make up for lost time or that he was especially prolific. He wasn’t. In his words, “I am a slow painter and devote to each painting all the time it seems to require. The whole purpose of art is excellence, and one good painting is better than 10,000 bad ones.”
Medearis spent his later years in San Marino with his wife and children, and it’s fitting that this little dot on the map is able to honor one of its own with a small but quietly glowing retrospective.
Roger Medearis: His Regionalism – the title is from the painter’s unfinished book, My Regionalism – is on view through Sept. 17 at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. The curator is Jessica Todd Smith and the show is supported by the Susan and Steven Chandler Exhibition Endowment and funds from Steve Martin for exhibitions of American art. In this day of vanishing museum brochures, Medearis is accorded one that’s a keeper. For hours and admission, call (626) 405-2100 or go to huntington.org.
