Stegner on Regionalism & Art

“Regionalism, cultural regionalism, is not an antiquarian fad like the cult of the hillbilly. It is contemporary, and it deals by preference with the usual rather than with the unusual, with the essentially normal rather than the picturesque, with cultures which are continuous and vital rather than with the isolated and the moribund. It is not concerned with “causes” and class struggles and political faiths, except as those touch the lives of the people and the patterns of the local life. The moment an artist loses his primary interest in human beings as people, and feels the impulse to throw his weight on one side or another of a cause, he loses his status as an artist, no matter how important his job as tractarian or propagandist may be. His job is no longer to enrich the understanding, but to coerce it, and that is not art. Regionalism is not a fighting doctrine, or a doctrine that needs even to be conscious in the artist’s mind. It is simply the recognition of the simplest truth about art: that the artist wastes his time and talent by trying to speak of anything but his own life and his own people and his own culture.”

Wallace Stegner, “Regionalism in Art,” Delphian Quarterly 22 (January 1939): 2–7, 18. (I take this quote from Matthew D. Stewart’s new book on Stegner “The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California” published May 2022.)