American scene painting, Regionalism, Social Realism definition

American scene painting is a particular style of representational, naturlistic art created in the United States from the 1920s - 1950s.  In this movement artists shy away from avant garde and abstraction.  Many American artists turned away from current art trends after WWI and decided to follow academic realism to portray rural and urban scenes in the USA.  A lot of this style portrays a feeling of romanticism and nationalism in the daily life of Americans.  Paintings of quaint towns, country landscapes and American city life were created by some artists to retreat from industrialization and by others to give a voice to their own political agendas and/or causes.  William S. Schwartz, Alexandre Hogue, Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, Thomas Benton and John Rogers Cox are all examples of artists in the movement.  And Thomas Benton studied with or taught several of the artists in the movement at the Kansas City Art Institute.  Some artworks under the movement focused on depicting the quaint/small towns in the USA and are frequently called American Regionalism.  Those artworks under the movement that focused on depicting social/political themes are called Social Realism. Isaac Soyer and Jack Levine are representatives of Social realists.