Genre painting was understood to be “in abeyance,” archaic, nostalgic, or no longer a meaningful category for art at the start of the twentieth century. But Edmund Tarbell and John Sloan pictured contemporary life in compositions borrowed from Johannes Vermeer and Gerrit Dou; Elizabeth Shippen Green and Norman Rockwell remade familiar genre themes and motifs for mass market magazines; the Whitney and other New York galleries staged a 1930s genre painting revival; and Jacob Lawrence, Ben Shahn and Honoré Sharrer staked a claim to paint after or beyond genre in the 1940s. In his new book, Re-envisioning the Everyday, John Fagg establishes a living tradition of painting everyday life that runs right through these decades; asks what happens when we see Sloan or Lawrence as genre painters; and reflects on what genre painting was and what genres, in general, are.
John Fagg is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of On the Cusp: Stephen Crane, George Bellows and Modernism (2009) and several articles and book chapters focusing on early-twentieth-century American literature and visual art, including the prize-winning “Chamber Pots and Gibson Girls: Clutter and Matter in John Sloan’s Graphic Art” (2015) and “Modernist Writing and Painting” in the Cambridge History of American Modernism (2023). John also curated the exhibitions Bellows and the Body (2016-17) and New York City Life: John Sloan’s Prints (2018) at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts and has contributed catalogue essays to exhibitions on Doris Lee, John Sloan, American printmaking (at the NGA), and Portraying American Workers (at the NPG), as well as for Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity, currently at the Reina Sofía. With Gordon Hutner he is co-editing a forthcoming Special Issue of American Literary History titled “Unpublished America.”
Organised by Professor David Peters Corbett (The Courtauld) as part of the Centre for American Art Series.
The Centre for American Art is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art
