In 20th century America, fashions in art have altered just as often and drastically as fashions in women's dress. Cocks of the walk in the 1930s were three Midwestern artists who are scarcely mentioned today: Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton. Their paintings (opposite and overleaf), included in a current retrospective show at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, are nostalgic reminders of a vanished era in recent U.S. history.
Death came to Wood and Curry in the 1940s, when both men were still in their prime. Terrible-tempered Tom Benton, the surviving...