Plague Winds: Meteorology in Marvin Cone’s Landscapes

Inspired by the violent derecho that struck central Iowa in 2020, this essay revisits the work of American regionalist painter Marvin Cone (1891–1965), whose hometown of Cedar Rapids lost nearly three quarters of its tree canopy in this unprecedented weather event. Studying Cone’s landscapes, in particular those that stage what I call a scenography of weather, the article asks to what extent late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century climate science and its dawning awareness of anthropogenic climate change was an influence on regionalist painting, particularly in the Midwest where agribusiness was (and of course still is) crucially dependent on weather. I argue that although Cone’s views on nature were largely anthropocentric and extractive, dependent on a presumed distance between the human and the natural world, that distance began to collapse under the weight of extreme weather events, scientific advancements in meteorology, and growing evidence of damage to the environment.