Focus on this artwork and explore the Composition.
In Tornado over Kansas, sometimes referred to as just The Tornado, an incoming tornado towers in the background as part of a dark storm. A distressed Kansan farm family in the foreground hurries to enter their storm cellar. Nearest the entry is a green-faced mother cradling her infant. Close by, a red-headed father hurries his daughter and yells at his sons. The two sons are distracted with rescuing pets: one holds onto a struggling black cat and another brings a litter of puppies, watched closely by their canine mother. Panicked horses can be seen beyond the farm's buildings. In the midst of the chaos, a complacent chicken refuses to move.The painting's tornado is regarded for its physical accuracy, an accomplishment that was possibly aided by first-hand descriptions and photographs. The art historian Lauren Kroiz, however, noted multiple "compositional perplexities". The placement of the son with the cat behind the porch steps suggests that the family ran along the path covered in wooden boards, but a chained wooden gate blocks that path. The filled metal tub beside the porch indicates recent rainfall, yet no other parts of the scene appear wet. Finally, all of the painting's figures cast shadows except, inexplicably, for the mother.Tornado over Kansas is described as an example of Regionalist painting: by the mid-1930s, art critics were identifying any depictions of daily life in the rural Midwest as "regionalist". The work illustrates a "direct representation" of the artist's own land in favor of the "introspective abstractions" of contemporary European painting, which—according to a 1934 Time article on the contemporary U.S. art scene—were qualities characteristic of Regionalism.
Regionalist tornado storm cellar Midwest litter Time Kansas Tornado