Summer Storm 1940

Thomas W. Nason created this wood engraving titled "Summer Storm" in 1949. The image depicts a dramatic sky and landscape, evoking both the beauty and the potential threat of nature. Nason was a traditionalist printmaker whose work often featured rural New England scenes. His choice of wood engraving, a technique that was somewhat archaic by the mid-20th century, speaks to a conservative artistic sensibility. At the time, many artists were embracing abstraction and other forms of modernism, but Nason stayed true to a representational style rooted in the American landscape tradition. We might understand this artistic conservatism as reflecting the cultural anxieties of the post-war period in America. The United States was becoming an urbanized and industrialized society, and some artists looked back nostalgically to an imagined rural past. To fully understand Nason's work, we might consult period magazines, exhibition catalogs, and other archival sources that would shed light on the artistic debates of his time. In this way, we come to see how the meaning of art is always contingent on its social and institutional context.