Grant Wood (February 13, 1891 - February 12, 1942) was an American painter. A native of Iowa, he was one of the leading regionalists of the 1930s, often painting countryside subjects in a primitivist and even satirical style. Among his best-known paintings is American Gothic.
Grant Wood's Life and career
Grant Wood was born in rural Iowa four miles (6 km) east of Anamosa in 1891; his mother moved the family to Cedar Rapids after his father died in 1901. Soon after, he started as an apprentice in a local metal store. After graduating from Washington High School, Wood enrolled in The Handicraft Guild, an all-women's art school in Minneapolis in 1910 (today it is a prominent collective of artists in the city).
He said he later returned to the Guild to paint American Gothic. A year later, Wood returned to Iowa, where he taught in a rural one-room schoolhouse. In 1913, he enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and did some work as a silversmith.
From 1922 to 1928, Wood made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, especially impressionism and post-impressionism. However, it was the work of the 15th century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck that influenced him to take on the clarity of this technique and incorporate it into his new works.
From 1922 to 1935, Wood lived in the attic of a carriage house in Cedar Rapids, which he turned into his personal studio at "5 Turner Alley" (the studio had no address until Wood made one). In 1932, Wood helped found the Stone City Art Colony near his hometown to help artists get through the Great Depression.
He became a major proponent of regionalism in the arts, giving lectures around the country on the subject. As his classically American image solidified, his bohemian days in Paris were wiped from his public persona.
Wood was married to Sara Sherman Maxon from 1935 to 1938. A little older than Grant, Sara was born in Iowa in 1887, and friends considered the marriage a mistake for him. Wood taught painting at the University of Iowa School of Art from 1934 to 1941. During this period, he supervised mural painting projects, mentored students, produced a variety of his own works, and became a key part of the University's cultural community.
It is thought that he was a repressed homosexual. Critic Janet Maslin claims that his friends knew him as "homosexual and a bit curious in his masquerade as a typical country boy." The university administration dismissed the allegations of an episode of harassment, and Wood would have returned as a professor if not for his increasing health problems.
On February 12, 1942, the day before his 51st birthday, Wood died at the university hospital of pancreatic cancer.He is buried in Riverside Cemetery in Anamosa, Iowa.
When Wood died, his estate went to his sister, Nan Wood Graham, the woman depicted in the artist's painting [[American Gothic]].
When she died in 1990, her estate, along with Wood's personal effects and various works of art, became the property of the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa.
Grant Wood's Regionalismo
Wood is associated with the American regionalism movement that was primarily in the Midwest, and the advancement of figurative painting of rural American subjects in an aggressive rejection of European abstraction.
Grant was one of three artists most associated with the movement. The others, John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, returned to the Midwest in the 1930s due to Wood's encouragement and assistance in locating teaching positions for them at colleges in the states of Wisconsin and Missouri, respectively.
Along with Benton, Curry and other regionalist artists, Wood's work was marketed through the Association of American Artists in New York for many years. Wood is considered the patron artist of Cedar Rapids, and his childhood parent school is depicted in the 2004 Iowa State Quarter.
Grant Wood's Gótico Americano
Wood's best-known work is his 1930 painting American Gothic, which is also one of the most famous paintings in American art and one of the few images to achieve the status of a widely recognized cultural icon, comparable to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Edvard Munch's The Scream.
American Gothic was first exhibited in 1930 at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it is still located. It received a $300 prize and made news nationwide, bringing the artist immediate recognition. Since then it has been borrowed and satirized endlessly for advertising and cartoons.
Art critics who had favorable opinions of the painting, such as Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley, assumed that the work must be a satire of repression, and narrowing of rural life in small towns. It was seen as part of the trend toward increasingly critical depictions of rural America along the lines of Sherwood Anderson's 1919, Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis's 1920, Main Street, and Carl Van Vechten's The Tattooed Countess in literature.
Wood rejected this reading. With the onset of the Great Depression, it came to be seen as a description of the steadfast American pioneer spirit. Another reading is that he is shown as an ambiguous fusion of reverence and parody.
Wood's inspiration came from Eldon, in southern Iowa, where a house designed in the Gothic Revival style with an upper window in the form of a pointed medieval arch provided the background and also the title of the painting.
Wood decided to paint the house along with "the kind of people I imagined should live in that house." The painting shows a farmer standing next to his spinster daughter, figures modeled by the dentist and the artist's sister, Nan (1900-1990). Wood's sister insisted that the painting depicts the farmer's daughter and not his wife, disliking suggestions she was the farmer's wife, since that would mean she looks older than Wood's sister preferred to think herself.
The dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby (1867-1950) was from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The woman is dressed in a dark print apron imitating the 19th century referent with a cameo brooch and a neatly tied bow, and the couple are in the traditional male and female roles, with the men's gallows symbolizing hard work.
The compositional severity and detailed technique derive from Northern Renaissance paintings, which Grant examined during three visits to Europe; After that, he became increasingly aware of the Midwest legacy, which also informs the work. It is a key image of regionalism.
Wood was hired in 1940, along with eight other prominent American artists, to document and interpret dramatic scenes and characters during the production of The Long Voyage Home, a film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's plays.