Joseph Meert
United States (born Belgium) 1905-1989 "How Green was my Valley" Kansas, ca. 1940
Lithograph
Spencer Museum of Art: Gift of the Steven Schmidt, Class of 1958, 2000.0002
Meert was born in Brussels, Belgium. He studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he later taught. He was also active in Colorado Springs. Richard Llewellyn’s famous 1939 novel, How Green was my Valley, concerned a Welsh coal mining family; in 1941 the novel appeared as a movie, directed by John Ford. There seems to be little connection with Llewellyn’s narrative here. Meert may have wished to suggest a parallel between the miners’ conflict with the modern world, detailed in Llewellyn’s novel, and a similar conflict in the life of a Kansas farmer.
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