Broken Ground: Plowing and America's Cultural Landscape in the 1930s

Abstract

This dissertation considers the significance of images related to plowing from the 1930s and their connection to humanity's relationship with the land. Environmental history, agricultural history, and the cultural geography of the plains are used in the analysis of these images to suggest the pervasiveness of the plow as a cultural symbol of man's relationship to the earth. My investigation begins with a chapter devoted to a chronological survey of European and American art depicting agricultural landscape imagery. My second chapter considers Grant Wood's 1931 painting "Fall Plowing," a depiction of a steel walking plow, to focus on the function, history, and impact of the implement itself. The next two chapters focus on artistic products of the Dust Bowl that expose problems inherent in American treatment of the land. The third chapter examines Pare Lorentz's 1936 documentary film "The Plow that Broke the Plains," which charts a history of soil exploitation. Alexandre Hogue's "Mother Earth Laid Bare" from 1938 and "Crucified Land" from 1939, the subjects of my fourth chapter, respond to the Dust Bowl through landscapes that have been ravished and sacrificed as a consequence of man's exploitative tendencies. My fifth chapter considers artists who identified and advocated practical solutions to the agricultural crisis. This tendency is best demonstrated by John Steuart Curry's work as artist-in-residence for the College of Agriculture at the University of Wisconsin. This investigation of human cultural engagement with the landscape concludes with an epilogue that contemplates the ways in which artists have explored the earth as a subject and medium amidst increasingly intensive systems of agriculture since the 1930s.