4 The crucial years of the Depression, as they are brought into historical focus, in creasingly emerge as the decisive decade for American art, if not for American culture in general. For it was during this decade that many of the conflicts which had blocked the pro gress of American art in the past came to a head and sometimes boiled over. Janus-faced, the thirties look backward, sometimes as far as the Renaissance; and at the same time for ward, as far as the present and beyond. It was the moment when artists, like Thomas Hart Benton, who wished to turn back the clock to regain the virtues of simpler times came into direct conflict with others, like Stuart Davis and Frank Lloyd Wright, who were ready to come to terms with the Machine Age and to deal with its consequences. America in the thirties was changing rapidly. In many areas the past was giving way to the present, although not without a struggle. A Predominantly rural and small town society was be ing replaced by the giant complexes of the big cities; power was becoming increasingly centralized in the federal government and in large corporations. Many Americans, deeply attached to the old way of life, felt disinherited. At the same time, as immigration decreased and the population became more homogeneous, the need arose in art and literature to commemorate the ethnic and regional differences that were fast disappearing. Thus, paradoxically, the conviction that art, at least, should serve some purpose or carry some message of moral uplift grew stronger as the Puritan ethos lost its contemporary reality. Often this elevating message was a sermon in favor of just those traditional American virtues, which were now threat ened with obsolescence in a changed social and political context. In this new context, the appeal of the paintings by the regionalists and the American Scene painters often lay in their ability to recreate an atmosphere that glorified the traditional American values—self-reliance tempered with good-neighborliness, independence modified by a sense of community, hard work rewarded by a sense of order and purpose. Given the actual temper of the times, these themes were strangely anachronistic, just as the rhetoric supporting political isola tionism was equally inappropriate in an international situation soon to involve America in a second world war. Such themes gained popularity because they filled a genome need for a comfortable collective fantasy of a God-fearing, white-picketfence America, which in retrospect took on the nostalgic appeal of a lost Golden Age. In this light, an autonomous art-for-art’s sake was viewed as a foreign invader liable to subvert the native American desire for a purposeful art. Abstract art was assigned the role of the villainous alien; realism was to personify the genuine American means of ex pression. The arguments drew favor in many camps: among the artists, because most were realists; among the politically oriented intellectuals, because abstract art was apoliti cal; and among museum officials, because they were surfeited with mediocre imitations of European modernism and were convinced that American art must develop its own distinct identity. To help along this road to self-definition, the museums were prepared to set up an artificial double standard, one for American art, and another for European art. In 1934, Ralph Flint wrote in Art News, "We have today in our midst a greater array of what may be called second-, third-, and fourth-string artists than any other country. Our big annuals are marvelous outpourings of intelligence and skill~ they have all the diversity and anima tion of a fine-ring circus. \ According to the passage, in the 1930s, abstract art was seen as______.

A. uniquely America
B. uniquely European
C. imitative of European modernism
D. counter to American regionalism