Did genre painting exist in the early twentieth century? This question forms the premise of John Fagg’s Re-envisioning the Everyday: American Genre Scenes, 1905–1945. Known primarily to historians of United States art as an antebellum practice and, secondarily, as a later nineteenth-century movement that recalled its predecessor, genre painting is rarely thought of as an avenue of early twentieth-century artistic expression. Yet, one of its defining features, the depiction of everyday life, appears prominently in the art of numerous practitioners of that time—even when such depictions differ politically and stylistically from earlier examples. As Fagg notes, recent scholarship by art historians including Michael Lobel and Patricia Hills has used the term “genre painting” to refer casually to art of the Ashcan School, commercial illustration, regionalism, social realism, and other related movements (14). Fagg sets out to parse this appellation. In so doing, he positions the first half of the twentieth century as a third major episode in the history of genre painting in the US, arguing that this mode was a “living tradition and practice” (14) in these years.

Through five chapters that encompass twentieth-century art criticism, exhibition history, historiography, and case studies of individual artists, Fagg examines the category of genre painting from its margins. He asks: could such a practice encompass urban subject matter, as opposed to the predominantly rural subjects of nineteenth-century examples? Must it retain a naturalistic style, or could it incorporate abstraction? Could it break out of the white, male-dominated normativity inscribed by earlier artists like William Sidney Mount and Richard Caton Woodville, that art historians such as Elizabeth Johns have outlined? Re-envisioning the Everyday demonstrates that genre painting did not simply evaporate at the end of the nineteenth century, nor was it necessarily retrograde in its formal qualities or its politics. Fagg’s book reveals the value of genre painting to artists, critics, and historians looking to make sense of the modern world and their place within it. At times explicitly, at other times implicitly, they used it to embrace or challenge the shifting circumstances of the United States in the new century.

Chapter one explores three relatively unrecognized artists whose work straddled its art historical antecedents and the urban settings, politics, and mass media culture of twentieth-century life: Jerome Myers, Edmund C. Tarbell, and Elizabeth Shippen Green. Spanning Myers’s outdoor city scenes in immigrant neighborhoods, Tarbell’s Impressionistic aesthetic interiors, and Green’s illustrations of women conducting daily domestic activities, Fagg’s examples show how these artists reconciled, each in their own ways, the visual traditions of the past, and the changing political scene of the Progressive Era. Grounding his analysis in the language of critics such as Frank Jewett Mather, Charles Caffin, and James Huneker, Fagg explains how Myers and Tarbell could have been considered modern painters on account of their subject matter and aesthetic. Yet they also shared many qualities with John George Brown’s urban kids and seventeenth-century Dutch painting’s carefully observed details, respectively. On Green, Fagg breaks away from period voices, pointing out that (male) critics of that time were biased against artists who were women—failing to account for artists such as her. Overall, Fagg “adheres to the period discourse so far as is productive” (19) but departs from it to assert his own views, arguing that Green’s vignettes revived the class tensions germane to genre scenes.

Chapter two investigates John Sloan’s attention to the domestic objects and spaces in New York City in the early 1900s and 1910s. Fagg argues that Sloan’s depictions of the chores and routines typically shouldered by women during this period were inextricable from political concerns—especially when published in the Masses and Harper’s Weekly, where they became tied to “feminist critique of household work as unpaid labor” and Progressive Era efforts to reform the home (57). Fagg’s analysis therefore complicates the existing literature of Patricia Hills, who has argued that Sloan viewed the women in his paintings as separate from politics, and complements that of Rebecca Zurier, who has focused on urban observation in Sloan’s scenes. Connecting paintings like Scrubwomen, Astor Library (1910–11) to visual traditions such as the compositional strategies of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting and the humor and narrative of antebellum US genre painting, Fagg locates the art historical roots of Sloan’s works. The chapter’s conclusion points to the racialized implications of these references; Fagg notes that the whiteness of these traditions, at the very least, did not clash with Sloan’s overwhelming focus on white city dwellers. Here, Fagg raises important questions about the ways Sloan’s art is like and unlike earlier genre traditions—a question that has been explored with respect to Sloan and the Ashcan movement more broadly by authors such as Martin Berger, Alexis Boylan, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, and Jordana Moore Saggese, as well as in my own work.

Chapter three centers Rockwell to study how mass-market magazines recast genre painting in illustration. Fagg notes that image-heavy weeklies like the Saturday Evening Post recreated the conditions in which earlier US genre painting flourished: they established stock types and familiar scenarios. This “communal imagery” shaped a hegemonic Americanism, becoming “as familiar and ordinary as everyday life itself” (89). By focusing on examples like Rockwell’s kids on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post and advertisements such as those for Piso’s for Coughs & Colds and Pratt and Lambert “61” Floor Varnish—both of which use an intergenerational theme—Fagg shows how Rockwell leveraged types to navigate the agendas of editors and advertising professionals. He also elucidates how these types reinforced a system that perpetuated a white-dominated status quo. While some of Rockwell’s later works such as The Problem We All Live With (1964), mentioned briefly, feature Black children, Rockwell’s earlier twentieth-century scenes were “familiar and relatable" to some but not all Americans (114)—another way in which the Rockwellian world mimed earlier US genre traditions, to the exclusion of nonwhite Americans.

Departing from case studies on individual artists, chapter four relies on period criticism, a consideration of patronage, and curatorial history to examine the 1930s genre painting revival. Fagg takes each in turn, covering a range of sources—from the magazine Arts and its ties to Lloyd Goodrich, a key proponent of genre painting, to the patronage of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and the Harmon Foundation. In a concise but critical section, Fagg reflects on how an increasingly diverse set of artists supported by these patrons used genre painting to locate themselves in a twentieth-century art world, in part because it allowed them to fit the expectations of more conservative institutions, while also facilitating opportunities to remake a tradition that had othered nonwhite male identities. For instance, Fagg asserts that Malvin Gray Johnson’s Thinning Corn (1934) moves between the generic and the specific to avoid caricature—a mode endemic to earlier iterations of the practice. The final portion of the chapter charts several 1930s exhibitions that addressed genre painting directly, such as Goodrich’s American Genre: The Social Scene in Paintings and Prints, 1800–1935, mounted at the Whitney Museum in 1935: the “first serious attempt to establish an American genre painting canon” (135). Fagg unpacks how its inclusions and omissions contributed to a reading of genre as nostalgic (as opposed to documentary) and bolstered a white experience of the everyday as normative.

Chapter five concentrates on Shahn and Lawrence. Fagg argues that these two artists maintained ties to genre painting while moving “beyond” it through their experiments in scale, text, seriality, source material, and “nonnaturalistic form” (159). This pairing raises the question of whether the identities of these artists—Shahn, a Jewish Russian immigrant, and Lawrence, a Black artist—might have informed their revisions of the genre. In his discussion of Shahn, Fagg centers on the artist’s Sunday Paintings, explicating the series’ connections to various New Deal programs with which Shahn was involved. A comparison between Sunday Painting (ca. 1938) and Winslow Homer’s Veteran in a New Field (1865) draws out symbolic meaning in these banal landscapes—part of how Shahn transcends genre—here, a contemplative turn to a more agrarian “everyday.” While Shahn reflected a government-funded “top-down imposition of modernity,” Fagg holds that Lawrence told the “bottom-up story of the Great Migration” in The Migration Series and in thirty paintings of Harlem from the early 1940s, which expressed Black Americans’ everyday past and present. Fagg demonstrates the usefulness of genre as a lens in his reading of the potbellied stove in Lawrence’s A Family (1943); he suggests that the stove may allude to the position of Black figures in earlier US genre painting or contemporaneous service sector jobs that Black Americans filled, an analysis that adds layers of politics and history to the artist’s scenes.

Overall, Re-envisioning the Everyday: American Genre Scenes, 1905–1945 presents a detailed and convincing account of how the tradition of genre painting was adapted, interpreted, and ultimately remade in the early twentieth century. Fagg explains how prominent critics and curators of the 1900s to the 1930s began to “canonize” genre painting as a phenomenon, and how artists used this framework to challenge and validate certain understandings of the “everyday” amidst rapid societal changes. In its interrogation of genre painting’s limits, Fagg’s book joins other publications in the field that have similarly probed periodization and categorization, such as Maggie M. Cao’s The End of Landscape in Nineteenth Century America (2018) and Lacey Baradel’s Mobility and Identity in US Genre Painting: Painting at the Threshold (2021). Because Re-envisioning the Everyday reflects so precisely on the historical demarcations of genre painting, an explanation from the author for the rationale behind the selection of artists treated in the book would be welcome—for, as he shows, the politics of whose everyday counts as genre informs, in part, how the story is written. Such a reflection would offer the reader a deeper understanding of how Fagg believes that genre painting in the twentieth century grappled with reimagining a “white, male, heteronormative” tradition (122) and further set the stage for future scholarship that might expand the array of artists and concerns related to scenes of everyday life.