Grant Wood
Grant Wood
1891 - 1942
American painter and printmaker. He was one of the Midwestern Regionalist painters of the 1930s who, with THOMAS HART BENTON and JOHN STEUART CURRY, created an art based on indigenous imagery from local surroundings. He has also been associated with American Scene painting (see fig.). Wood’s most famous painting, American Gothic (Chicago, IL, A. Inst.), features a nameless, dour farmer and his spinster daughter standing in front of a Carpenter Gothic farmhouse. Since its first appearance in 1930, cartoonists and advertisers have borrowed and parodied this staid Midwestern pair, who have come to represent an archetype of middle America.
In 1910 and 1911 Wood studied at the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft with Ernest Batchelder (1875–1957), a leading advocate of the English Arts and Crafts Movement. From 1912 to 1916 Wood undertook short periods of study at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He travelled abroad intermittently throughout the 1920s and was enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris in the autumn of 1923. In 1932 he helped to establish the Stone City Colony and Art School, an experimental Midwestern art colony that lasted for two summers. In 1934 he was appointed Iowa State Director of the New Deal’s short-lived Public Works of Art Project, and later that year he joined the University of Iowa.
Wood’s early paintings were mainly landscapes and architectural views executed with a thick brush in an impressionistic style. In 1928 he travelled to Munich to supervise production of a stained-glass window he had designed for the Veterans’ Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. Ostensibly it was the 15th-century Netherlandish Masters that he saw at the Alte Pinakothek that prompted him, on his return to Iowa, to paint Midwestern themes using strong local colour and sharp contrasts. Wood was impressed by the convention of depicting universal or religious themes using settings and costumes that reflected the contemporary life of the artist. He was also attracted to the hard-edged attention to detail of the Netherlandish style (HANS MEMLING’s in particular), visual qualities that coincided with his interest in CURRIER & IVES prints, American folk art, and the decorative traditions of 19th-century Americana.
Wood’s first Netherlandish-inspired canvas, Woman with Plants (1929; Cedar Rapids, IA, Mus. A.), portrays a Midwestern woman in country garb (an apron trimmed with rick-rack, a cameo brooch) holding a hardy snake plant, frequent accoutrement of the pioneer woman. The composition derives from Renaissance portraiture, with the half-length figure close to the picture plane, juxtaposed against a distant landscape, but the windmill and the shocks of corn visible over the sitter’s shoulder localize Wood’s painting to the American Midwest. Although Wood himself credits his trip to Munich as the catalyst for his conversion to Regionalism, other, more immediate sources for Wood’s turn to Midwestern themes have been uncovered (Corn). One source is Wood’s admiration for the writings of Jay Sigmund and Ruth Suckow, both of Iowa, who encouraged Midwesterners to cherish their indigenous heritage and eschew the prevalent inferiority complex regarding East Coast and European culture. Woman with Plants seems to be a translation into paint of the protagonist pioneer woman in Suckow’s short story ‘Midwestern Primitive’, which appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1928.
From 1930 to 1932 Wood produced numerous canvases in the new style, with hard-edged detail, geometricized forms, and stylized contours, often tinged with myth and wit. He enjoyed broad popularity and critical acclaim from 1930 to 1935, but by the late 1930s, as international political concerns overshadowed domestic ones, Regionalist art had come under attack for its parochialism, its Midwestern chauvinism, its narrative style, and its patent refusal to keep pace with an emerging new American abstract art that would dominate in the post-war years. [M. Sue Kendall. "Wood, Grant." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 15, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T092155.]
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