A movement in American painting, beginning in the mid-1920s and culminating in the 1930s. Artists  such as John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton depicted scenes of typical American life and landscape, painted in a descriptive, naturalistic style. American Scene Painting can be seen as an attempt to define a uniquely American style of art and a reaction against European, avant-garde abstraction.

John Steuart Curry. Tornado over Kansas. Oil on canvas. 1929. Muskegon Museum of Art, Michigan.