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In art, regionalism is a realist modern American art movement wherein artists shunned the city and rapidly developing technological advances to focus on scenes of rural life. Regionalist style was at its height from 1930 to 1935, and is best-known through the so-called "Regionalist Triumvirate" of Grant Wood in Iowa, Thomas Hart Benton in Missouri, and John Steuart Curry in Kansas. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Regionalist art was widely appreciated for its reassuring images of the American heartland.

However, before World War II the concept of “Modernism” was not clearly-defined in American art. Central issues that were being debated at the time were "Who are the Modernists?" and "What is Modernism?". As Wanda Corn has argued in The Great American Thing, there was a general concern with defining what is American in American art. Partly due to the Great Depression, Regionalism became the dominant art movement in America in the 1930s. At the time, the United States was still a heavily agricultural nation with only a small portion of its population living in industrial cities such as New York or Chicago.

The debate over “Modernism” was really a conflict over who would define American art. Conservative critics who promoted Regionalism, such as Thomas Craven, often did so while complaining that Regionalism was too Modern. It received conservative support because they saw it as a way to defeat the influence of abstraction arriving from Europe. The earlier debate between abstraction and realism that began with the 1913 Armory Show in New York continued in the 1930s over Regionalism; by the 1940s this debate had evolved into two “camps” that were divided geographically: the Regionalists, whose work was realist and who primarily lived in rural areas (and were promoted by conservative, Anti-Modernist critics such as Thomas Craven) and the Abstract artists who primarily lived in New York (and were promoted by the Pro-Modernist critics such as Alfred Stieglitz). Regionalism’s loss of status in the art world is mainly a result of who was promoting it in the 1930s—the Anti-Modernists. When the Pro-Modernist critics gained power in the 1940s, Regionalism’s fate (the negative perception it has today) was guaranteed.

However, Regionalism bridged the gap between a completely abstract art and the academic realist art in much the same way that the Post-Impressionists (Cezanne, Van Gogh, Renoir and Gauguin among others) had done in France a generation earlier. The Regionalists prepared the way for Abstract Expressionists to emerge in America (for example, Jackson Pollock’s drip technique originated with exercises Thomas Hart Benton used in the art classes Pollock took while a student). Regionalism had the same influence on later American art that the Post-Impressionists had in France with the European Modernists.

In Grant Wood's pamphlet "Revolt Against the City", published in Iowa City, 1935, he asserts that American artists and buyers of art were no longer looking to Parisian culture for subject matter and style. Wood wrote that Regional artists interpret physiography, industry, and psychology of their hometown, and that the competition of these preceding elements creates American culture. He wrote that the lure of the city was gone, and hopes that art of the widely diffused "whole people" would prevail. He cites Thomas Jefferson's characterization of cities as "ulcers on the body politic."

Regionalism had a strong influence on popular culture. Regionalist-type imagery appeared in magazine advertisements, and influenced American children's book illustrators such as Holling Clancy Holling.

• American scene painting
• Artistic nationalism
• Laura Marie Greenwood
• Modernism
• Grant Wood

• Regionalism, exhibition, Sioux City Art Center
• American Scene Painting and Regionalism