SAVANNAH, GA.- The Telfair Museum of Art presents Coming Home: American Paintings, 1930-1950, from the Schoen Collection, an extensive private collection of American art produced during the tumultuous decades spanning the Great Depression and World War II, through July 24, 2005. Featuring 127 largely representational works from the 1930s and 1940s, the show explores a variety of themes including regional life; urban and industrial landscapes; signage, billboards and the American road; work and labor; the Depression on the farm and in the city; social protest; and fantasy and post-surrealism.

The paintings presented in Coming Home exhibit a broad array of stylistic tendencies including social realism, regionalism, surrealism, magic realism, precisionism, and American scene painting. The show includes works by celebrated artists Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Philip Evergood, Ben Shahn, and Paul Cadmus. Also featured are Lamar Dodd, Robert Gwathmey, Andree Ruellan, and Peppino Mangravite, who are represented in the Telfair’s permanent collection. This engaging exhibition includes important Georgia artists like Dodd and a number of others who worked in Savannah, such as Alexander Brook.

Many of the artists included in Coming Home worked under the auspices of various New Deal programs, producing murals and other art for public consumption. As scholar Erika Doss notes in the handsome catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, “For over a decade, from about 1933 to 1943, the federal government was the primary patron of American art and artists.” Co-organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, and the Mobile Museum of Art, Coming Home is the first major show devoted to Depression and war-era American painting to be held at the Telfair. This program is supported in part by the Georgia Council for the Arts through the appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly. The Council is a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts. Mobile Museum of Art programs are made possible, in part, by a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.