Hogue said “… if the paintings have the power to vivify the condition and incite action, I am truly flattered. While some argued that the dust storms were a freak of nature, experienced farmers knew that their damage was magnified by poor soil conservation practices. He witnessed many farmers and ranchers try in vain to save their farms, and then, in desperation, move West in hopes of starting again and making a better life.ĭust Bowl and two other paintings from Hogue’s Erosion series created a furor in Texas when they were reproduced in the nationally-distributed Life magazine in June 1937. Hogue grew up in Texas and saw first-hand how the landscape was over-cultivated, then further stressed by the elements of nature. The only vestiges of a plant are the dried brush in the lower left foreground.ĭust Bowl shows us the extreme drought, soil erosion, and looming dust storms that bore down upon the Midwest plains in the early 1930’s. What don’t you see that you might expect to find on a Midwest farm? There are no people, animals, crops or sign of water. The whirring dust blurs the edges of a tall windmill, once used to pump live-giving water out of a well. Far in the distance we see the dwarfed silhouette of farm buildings. The sharp diagonal of the central wooden support emphasizes the harsh line of sunlight above it, and line of tracks in the dirt.Ī menacing dark red cloud of dirt nearly envelopes a last wedge of sunlight in the sky. Now that it’s cut, with sections of barbed wire laying loosely on the ground, it shows signs of an exit from someone with no concern for maintaining its function. The once sturdy fence would have protected a farm’s land and livestock. What could this imply?Ī wood and barbed wire fence bisects the fore and background sections of the painting. What made the tracks that lead off to the left? A lone animal or human?ĭescribe the condition of the fence. What do you think made the patterns? The linear pattern of dust blown by wind gusts is abruptly cut by curved wheel prints leading out of the picture frame, including a single remaining zig-zag of a tire tread. What information can we learn about the American landscape and plight of the American Farmer during the Dust Bowl? What clues does Hogue give us about his knowledge and understanding of the land that was once plentiful with grasses and wheat? Observing details and analyzing components of the painting, then putting them in historical context, enables the viewer to interpret the overall message of the work of art. When drought struck in 1930, the ceaseless prairie winds lifted the dry topsoil off the land and bore it eastward in storms that reached altitudes of eight thousand feet, known as “black blizzards.” The Okies, immortalized in Dorothea Lange’s photographs and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, left Texas, Kansas, and Colorado for California by the thousands, victims of the broken pioneer promise.ĭownload a Teaching Poster PDF of Dust BowlĪrtists make choices in communicating ideas. Farmers struggled to remain solvent by putting ever more marginal land into production as commodity prices fell. The agricultural disaster of the dust bowl was brought on in part by poor farming practices as well as drought and a depressed economy. The Great Depression of the 1930s was presaged by the agricultural depression of the 1920s. As the war ended, huge surpluses quickly accumulated, prices plummeted, and farm foreclosures increased. In response to the demands of wartime, farmers had taken on debt to mechanize. As work animals were replaced, yet more land was released from pasture to be planted in wheat or cotton or used for dairy production. By the end of the war farmers had purchased nearly 85,000 motorized farm vehicles. During the Great War, in response to the call for food to feed Europe, Americans put ever more land into production, and with the tractor and other mechanized equipment, yields increased. For the forty-five million citizens still living in the country in 1930, most had no electricity or indoor plumbing they heated their homes and cooked on wood stoves, and lit their houses with kerosene lamps. By the 1930s, the character of American rural life began to change.
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