Grant Wood

Fine Artist

• Born: February 13, 1891
• Birthplace: Near Anamosa, Iowa
• Died: February 12, 1942
• Place of death: Iowa City, Iowa

American painter

Wood was one of the central figures of midwestern regionalism, a visual and literary arts movement in the United States during the 1920’s and 1930’s that emphasized the history, lifestyles, and folkways of specific geographic areas.

Area of achievement Art

Early Life

Grant Wood was born to Francis Wood and Hattie (Weaver) Wood on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa. Two years later, Wood’s father died, whereupon his mother moved her three sons and one daughter to Cedar Rapids, about twenty-five miles away. As a child, Wood drew and made watercolor studies of birds, flowers, and tree branches with an innate sense of proportion and composition. On graduation from Washington High School in 1910, Wood enrolled for two consecutive summers at the Minneapolis School of Design and Handcraft to study design. Such instruction seemed to encourage Wood to continue exploring his interest in landscapes for several years, which was expressed in small-panel oil paintings.

During the next academic year or two, Wood taught various courses at a country school near Cedar Rapids. Nevertheless, he also found time to enroll in a night life-drawing class at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. In 1913 Wood traveled to Chicago, Illinois, worked as designer for Kalo Silversmiths Shop, and then opened his own silversmith business, the Wolund Shop, with a partner. While in Chicago, Wood attended night classes at the School of Art Institute. By 1915, the Wolund Shop had closed, whereupon Wood returned to Cedar Rapids.

The years 1916 through 1918 saw Wood primarily involved in nonart activities, including building a home for his immediate family and enlisting in the U.S. Army, where his duties included designing artillery camouflage in Washington, D.C. By September, 1919, Wood was again teaching art, this time at Jackson Junior High, a Cedar Rapids public school. In October he showed twenty-three paintings in a two-person exhibit at a Cedar Rapids department store.

The next summer Wood traveled to Europe and painted in and around Paris with fellow Iowa artist Marvin Cone. Rather than seeking formal training or attempting to join the avant-garde artists who lived in Paris, they instead roamed the city searching for subject matter. The resulting sketches and finished compositions recorded unspectacular vignettes of Paris and the countryside around it. The paintings were generally composed with a central focus and painted with large brush strokes and palette-knife work. Returning to the United States that September, Wood began teaching at McKinley High School.

In 1923 Wood returned to France and attended classes at the prestigious Académie Julian in Paris. When not in class, he again painted rather nondescript areas of Paris, certain French provinces, and Belgium. Several works evidenced an interest in medieval portals and doorways in areas such as Brittany. In the fall of 1924, Wood returned to the United States and resumed high school art instruction in Cedar Rapids but retired from it altogether in May, 1925. His goal was to be an independent, full-time artist. He continued painting Iowa landscapes and also created several handsome portraits. There had been no radical shifts or deviations in his work since late adolescence. Instead, Wood’s early development seemed to be toward a competent, rather comfortable realism that was respectful of the expectations of his small town and rural Iowa clientele. That viewpoint continued through the 1920’s in spite of trips to Europe.

Life’s Work

Another voyage to Europe in 1928 involving a stained-glass window commission unexpectedly precipitated a major stylistic change in Wood’s paintings. He traveled to Munich, Germany, where he supervised the creation of a twenty-four-by-twenty-foot window for the American Legion building in Cedar Rapids. While there, Wood visited the city’s famous museum collections, where he was captivated by the late Gothic and early Renaissance paintings of Dutch and German artists. Wood was already acquainted with this period in art history by faithfully reading Craftsman magazine.

It was not the traditional iconographic content and symbolism that intrigued Wood. Rather, his attention was caught by the highly organized, preplanned, and linear compositions; the symmetrically formal design; the refined figure and landscape elements; and the meticulous details. Of special note was Wood’s awareness that even in this centuries-old art, artists often incorporated city views, landmarks, dress, and other contemporary features not for illustrative story sensibility but as a matter of integrated form and composition. Soon Wood began to think of ways to introduce pattern and design from his own historical period into his paintings.

In 1929 Wood’s portrait work continued with the introduction of thematic elements. Woman with Plants, a portrait of the artist’s mother, was one of his first attempts at creating a subtle narrative through symbolism as an emulation of the German and Flemish Renaissance masterpieces he had seen in Munich. His mother was rendered with unflattering frankness and spartan but precise description with modest attire (including an apron over a black dress) and weathered face and hands, the latter clutching a plant in a clay pot. The rural landscape presence in this painting and in a similar thematic figurative painting, Appraisal (1932), reflected agrarian and small-town living, which became Wood’s major area of exploration for the rest of his career.

The best-remembered of the thematic portraits evolved into a classic work of American satire American Gothic (1930). It presents a farm couple standing in front of a modest frame house with touches of the Gothic Revival style. The unforgettable imagery is anchored in the foreground, where the scrupulously clean, plain-featured, and plain-dressed couple stands and firmly, resolutely, and quietly returns the viewer’s gaze. The thin, small-framed man, bespectacled and balding, wears a dress shirt minus its starched collar, bib overalls, and a dark suit jacket. His right hand grips the handle of an upturned, three-pronged pitchfork. Standing to his right and slightly behind him is a woman both younger and shorter yet equally plain and somber. She is, one assumes, his wife. This woman, with blond, straight hair parted in the middle and gathered at the back, wears a dark dress with a white collar and a cameo brooch at the neckline. The pointed, arched window over the porch roof, divided into three sections by slender, pointed mullions, likewise echoes the three tines of the pitch fork. Together they may refer, in an ironic way, to the Trinity of the Christian faith. Hence, by inference, the image suggests a nonmaterial ethic of hardworking people rooted in an endless agricultural cycle of planting and harvesting complemented by a simple, unwavering, stoic spiritual faith.

American Gothic was essentially an overnight success, catapulting Wood into national awareness. His gentle satire and irony, balanced by a nostalgic longing for the Iowa of his youth, found a receptive audience among cosmopolitan viewers. Soon Wood was in demand as a lecturer. He traveled across the nation encouraging regional-based artists to focus on the indigenous qualities of their areas rather than importing European subjects and mainstream modernism.

Somewhat concurrent with American Gothic came Wood’s first major landscape painting in his signature manner. Stone City, Iowa (1930) depicts an aerial view of a tiny village with a deep vista of rolling hills under a cloudless sky. The viewer is introduced to the artist’s summarized, simplified, and regularized hills, trees, and fields, both planted and stacked with hay or cornshocks. The open land is skintight and smooth with peach-like cleavage. The landscape also includes a young corn crop in the lower foreground, the full green foliage of late spring along a river bank, highway windbreaks, and one sizable wooded area. The overall impact is arresting to the point of fantasy. Wood’s soft, glowing chiaroscuro painting influenced animated cartoons of the 1940’s as well as two background set designs of farm landscapes in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. Wood painted many more landscapes with rural life or agricultural themes after Stone City, Iowa, all of which were touched by it without becoming thin restatements. Complementing those paintings was a series of meticulously rendered and masterfully printed lithographs.

Wood’s sensitive perception of life was not limited to agriculture and livestock. In 1936, his satirical gifts resulted in a set of commissioned illustrations in charcoal pencil and chalk for a new edition of Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel Main Street. Yet the best-remembered satirical works beyond American Gothic tackled several of the myths of American history, namely Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931), Daughters of Revolution (1932), and Parson Weems’ Fable (1939). In the first painting, Paul Revere rides at breakneck speed through a dark colonial hamlet rousing the citizenry to alarm and action with no concern on the artist’s part about whether the event was painted factually. In Parson Weems’ Fable, young George Washington (with a child’s body but an adult head that is probably based on the Gilbert Stuart portrait on the U.S. one dollar bill) faces his father’s wrath after cutting down a young cherry tree. Finally, in Daughters of Revolution, three matronly women with rather masculine faces and sober expressions seem to gaze at viewers with skepticism as if the ladies’ monthly meeting has been interrupted by an uninvited visitor. They stand in front of a framed print of George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River in advance of his daring raid on the English troops at Trenton, New Jersey.

Despite Wood’s stature as a painter in the 1930’s the urge to multiply the numbers of regionalist painters led him to cofound the Stone City Colony and Art School and to teach there during the two summers of its existence (1932-1933). Teaching remained part of his life as he was appointed associate professor of fine arts at the University of Iowa in 1934. That year he was also named director of the Public Works of Art Project for Iowa and personally launched two murals for the Iowa State University library in Ames.

In 1935, Wood wrote a lengthy essay called “Revolt Against the City,” published independently in Iowa City by Frank L. Mott as a pamphlet. Wood’s essay formally outlined his primary beliefs in what became known as regionalism and promoted family farm life, local dress, and the landscape of one’s region as highly worthwhile material for American art. During the same year, Wood married Sara Maxon (they were divorced four years later) and had important one-person exhibitions in Chicago and New York. About six months after Wood’s death in 1942, the Art Institute of Chicago mounted a memorial exhibition for him, which included forty-eight works.

Significance

Wood is remembered as the Depression-era artist from Iowa who, clad in bib overalls, made paintings and lithographs that extolled and sometimes ribbed rural and small-town life. He emerged as the leading spokesperson for the realistic style called regionalism. The art world of Wood’s later years (1930-1942) was increasingly dominated by European modernism. Its exponents considered Wood’s art and that of other notable regionalists, such as John Steuart Curry of Kansas and Thomas Hart Benton from Missouri, as regressive and isolationist. By the 1970’s, modernism itself had been declared passé, resulting in a postmodern period. Ironically, the last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed the flourishing of regional studies programs in academia that stressed indigenous qualities of America’s regions just as Wood had promoted in the 1930’s.

Bibliography

Biel, Steven. American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. A history of Wood’s famous painting that chronicles how it has been interpreted at various times in its history.

Corn, Wanda. Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983. This well-researched exhibition catalogue contains reproduced paintings accompanied by good notes of decent length. Also noteworthy is a thirteen-page section titled “American Gothic: The Making of a National Icon.”

Dennis, James M. Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture. New York: Viking Press, 1976. A thorough critical study of Wood’s development, his major paintings and prints, the rise of regionalism, and his resistance to the mechanization of farming and the creeping standardization of American life. The appendix includes a reprint of Wood’s essay “Revolt against the City.”

Garwood, Darrell. Artist in Iowa: A Life of Grant Wood. New York: W. W. Norton, 1944. Surely the first biography of Wood, Garwood’s book was published just two years after the artist’s death. It is perceptive and well written, filling out the personal forces that shaped the painter.

Hoving, Thomas. American Gothic: The Biography of Grant Wood’s American Masterpiece. New York: Chamberlain Brothers, 2005. A history of the painting that includes biographical information about Wood, describing how his most famous work originated from the place where he lived and his personal experiences.

Jennings, Kate. Grant Wood. London: Bisbon Books, 1994. A thoughtfully written and exceptionally well-illustrated study keeps this publication from being a slender coffee table book. Contains some rare biographical photographs and source works for Wood’s paintings.

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