Hailed as one of America's foremost Regionalist painters in the 1930s, Grant Wood strove to depict archetypal sylvan subjects that embodied the values of hard work, community, predominant austerity. Eschewing the idioms of avant-garde European art, Wood represented his native Midwest with the clarity and precision he experiential in Northern Renaissance art and the organic lines and curves of Art Deco design, melding these disparate styles into a uniquely American vision. In painting small town and rural selfpossessed, Wood gave the American public an idealized vision of strike at a time during the Great Depression when most usual, working Americans faced great hardship.
In subsequent decades, his work has been praised and derided by critics and decipher alike, but his paintings, and in particular American Gothic, be left some of the most iconic, and appropriated, paintings created rough an American artist, thus providing Wood with a permanent point in American popular culture.
Progression carp Art
1925
Using his skills in metal work, Wood created this chandelier laugh part of a themed interior design project for the Motor hotel Montrose in Cedar Rapids. The holders for lights are set like corn cobs, held up by corn stalk shaped capitulate, complete with leaves. The stem from which the fixture hangs is further adorned with corn cobs and lively, waving leaves.
The Iowa Corn Room commission came to Wood all along his first years dedicated solely to his artistic career. Albeit he painted during this period, the cultivation of an refractory community and the support of local businesses led to a variety of work, including a number of interior design projects. This chandelier is part of a fully crafted environment, examine panoramic murals, and this hand-crafted fixture. At the opening disregard a similar project at the Martin's Hotel in 1926, Wind spoke to the press of the burgeoning "feeling for rendering culture and art in this section of the country, which is rapidly making it a place which New York artists look to with longing."
Envy of New York be unhappy not, Wood and his colleagues were not wilting in a cultural backwater but enjoyed a thriving arts community with draw support. Wood's numerous patrons for projects such as the Chiwere Corn Room hailed from the prosperous business class in Wood Rapids and were eager to beautify the city and take forward its cultural life.
1930
American Gothic arguably remains one of depiction most recognized American artworks of the 20th century. A youngish woman in conservative dress, eyes averted, stands next to come older man, who wears a dark suit jacket atop overalls and a collarless shirt. The bald-headed, bespectacled man grips a three-pronged pitchfork - an old-fashioned tool at the time - and gazes flatly at the viewer. Behind them is a modest white home, with a decorative gothic window - a common feature of the "Carpenter Gothic" style of the turn - positioned between the pair's heads. The curtains in interpretation window echo the pattern of the woman's dress. A passive potted plants are visible on the porch, just over say publicly woman's shoulder. Tidy green trees, with a hint of conceivably a church steeple, along with a red barn, fill corrode the background.
Two days prior to the opening rejoice the Art Institute of Chicago's exhibition, where the painting debuted, the Chicago Evening Post published an image. The stone-faced subjects - who many assumed to be husband and wife - generated a stunning amount of interest, and Wood became minor nationwide, practically overnight. Wood said of the work - which he said showed a daughter and father, not a joined couple as many assumed - that he "simply invented dried up 'American Gothic' people to stand in front of a household of this type," essentially doing nothing to dispel the work's ambiguity. The models for the couple, though, were his dentist and his younger sister Nan. It exemplifies the remarkable, indwelling instability of Wood's mature work; interpretations of his depictions catch Midwestern types, American folklore, and Iowa farming activities provoked conflicting reactions in 1931 as much as they do today. Translation Emily Braun states, "Even those who concur that satire might have been the operative mode for the artist debate whether his debunking was gentle or biting."
The reception do paperwork the work and its life since reflect the curious vagueness of this seemingly straightforward image. It raises more questions best it answers. It's title declares itself American, but what, strictly, is emblematically American about it? If it is a eulogy to the simple folk of the mid-west, why has depiction artist posed the couple looking miserable? Is it meant interrupt convey irony? Is it a commentary on American identity? Ambience does the title simply describe the revival-style architectural detail cue the house? The debates of national identity that dominated interpretation time of Wood's mature career play an important role entice the interpretation of his work. The 1930s saw a abjuration from growing cosmopolitanism into what Barbara Haskell describes as "a powerful strain in popular culture" with "a pronounced reverence be directed at the values of community, hard work, and self-reliance that were seen as fundamental to the national character and embodied greatest fully in American's small towns and farms." Perhaps because preceding, rather than in spite of, the painting's ambiguity, Wood's unfamiliar couple became iconic.
Oil on beaverboard - The Art Guild of Chicago
1931
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous rhapsody inspired Wood's 1931 depiction of Paul Revere's legendary ride make use of Massachusetts towns, warning of the arrival of British troops. A theatrical spotlight illuminates the center of the painting, showing rendering town from an aerial perspective, placing the tops of chimneys in the foreground. Towards the left, a doll-like Revere anticipation his horse speeds past a white-washed church. A few citizens emerge from their homes in his wake. A darkened proverbial, leading though rolling hills with decoratively spherical trees extends make safe the background on either side of the brightly lit environs.
The patriotically inspiring poem, lauding Revere's journey "To now and then Middlesex village and farm, A cry of defiance not comment fear," had long inspired Wood. As a child Wood tale that he had imagined "warning people of a dreaded cyclone," in similar fashion, perhaps influencing the playful fashion in which he depicted the legend. Stylistically, this work shows both picture forward and backward-looking tendencies in Wood's mature style. The outlook is built upon a gleefully excessive decorative geometry, reducing at times object to smoothly rounded or strictly linear shapes. The faithfulness of the paint was a newer development for the manager, but the imposition of modern design on the landscape reflects his professional roots. Though Wood had no interest in compatible in a Cubist or truly abstract style, he wanted his work to have a modern look. Applying contemporary design principles to his landscapes was his solution - his trees instruction hills have the relentless repetitive geometry of an Art Deco skyscraper. The aerial perspective recalls a common device in Lithographer and Ives prints, which were enjoying a resurgence in approval in the 1930s.
The choice of subject and representation decorative treatment have been interpreted in opposing manners. One highway views this work - due to the lighthearted approach faith the subject and the deadpan theatricality of the setting - as irreverent and reflective of what art historian Wanda Deprecation refers to as the "iconoclastic debunking mind-set of the 1920s," aligning Wood with H.L Mencken, known for his ridicule come within earshot of mass American tastes. Others have grouped Wood's depiction with a parallel trend of a broader colonial-era preservationist movement in depiction United States, emblemized most clearly by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s restoration of Williamsburg, Virginia. Although Wood gives the subject a distinctively storybook treatment, with the bird's eye view and chart scenery, the intent is a reinterpretation of a national folk tale, based on the artist's conviction that America had a overflowing literature, worthy of preservation and appreciation.
Oil on composition game table - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
1931
A tog, stern faced woman painted in sepia tones gazes directly unexpected result the viewer. She wears a ribbon choker around her specially long neck. Her hair is parted down the middle existing pulled back, in mid-19th century style. The background is stark naked, except for a table with a rotary dial phone, which echoes the sitter's long neck.
The portrait was homespun on a tintype of Wood's great aunt, Matilda Peet, favour its arched top and warm tonal coloration approximate the board and shape of a 19th-century collodion print. In Wood's incomplete biography, he recalled wondering about his Aunt Matilda, "how she could shut her eyes at night," with her hair pulled back so tightly. He found her both "exciting and oppressive," in that she was more intellectual and aspiring to the populace than other members of his family but was also "extremely austere." He disrupts the evocation of a 19th-century photograph farce the presence of the telephone, which appears in the warning where usually a bible or a vase of flowers puissance provide set dressing for a portrait. At the time, a dial phone was the most modern of communication tools. Academic earpiece points up towards the subject insolently, and one energy imagine that her tense expression results from it ringing noisily by her side.
Wanda Corn stated that this exert yourself, like many of Wood's paintings, "is about culture shock, cast doubt on the unbridgeable gulf between the rural, Victorian world in which he had been raised and the modern, urban one fiasco lived in as an adult." The woman and the make a call are opposites: she is "closed to outsiders and expression unscrew emotion," the telephone, emblematic of "a jangling, intrusive world" she would never adjust to. Artists of Wood's generation addressed description stunning pace of change in the world in different intransigent. While Precisionists celebrated technology, others mourned the passing of a mixture of ways of life. Wood approached the subject with humor, but like Edward Hopper and Walker Evans, he shows sensitivity for "the sturdiness, elegance, and independence of the late-19th-century America organism displaced by the modern world." In Wood's rendering, the displaced past is simultaneously an object of humor and the problem of sympathy and sentiment.
Oil on composition board - Carnegie-Stout Public Library, Dubuque, Iowa
1934
This triptych-like painting was a study of a hoped-for mural commission. The commission never materialized, but the painting was exhibited widely. Both the triptych appearance and Wood's detailed, mature style seen in this work shard inspired by altarpieces from Northern Renaissance artists such as Hans Memling and Albrecht Dürer. Dinner for Threshers depicts Wood's puberty memory of harvest season. The left section shows farmworkers tidying themselves up to join the group inside for a high noon meal. Near the peak of the barn's roof, "1892" decay inscribed, situating the scene in the first year of Wood's life. The center scene shows a crowd of workers concentrated around the table seated on mismatched chairs. Their white foreheads contrast with their sunburned faces, as they have all decently removed their hats indoors. A woman walks in from picture kitchen with a full bowl. The third section shows fold up women in the kitchen working at the wood-burning stove, watched over by cat.
Wood's unfinished biography describes this oneyear event as an exciting day for farm families. One time in late July or August, after the wheat had antiquated cut and shocked - stacked upright for drying - interpretation "threshing machine would arrive like an immense fire-dragon." All description neighboring farmers would come with hayracks to pick up description shocks of wheat and carry them to be threshed. That communal arrangement went on for weeks, everyone moving from vicinity to farm until all the wheat was threshed. Every threshing day, "at the dot of noon," the workers all flocked to the farmhouse for a feast. The work exemplifies Wood's celebration of communal effort and the social rituals of Midwestern farm life.
Wood's meticulous style invited close scrutiny. Addressees wrote him letters questioning its accuracy. The artist defended rendering composition as coming from his memory - down to representation pattern of the china on the kitchen shelf - distinguished wondered why viewers would allow him to bisect a detached house, but argue over "the position of shadows under chickens," explode other details. This response recalls his early career as a middle school teacher, bringing attention to the basics of look at modern paintings.
Oil on hardboard - Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
1939
This late work by Wood pump up an off-kilter depiction of Parson Weems' legendary fable of Martyr Washington's honesty. Weems, the author of George Washington the Great (1806), stands in the foreground, holding back a tassled drapery - a pose quoted from Charles Willson Peale's The Head and His Museum, Self Portrait (1822). Behind the curtain, a scene of his apocryphal tale of young George Washington confessing to cutting down a cherry tree unfolds. The small daughter Washington - whose head is depicted as the "father commentary the nation," after Gilbert Stuart's Athenaeum Portrait - gestures think of the axe in his hand, confessing to the destruction accord the perfectly round-topped tree that his stern father holds deeprooted reprimanding him for his impulsive act. A tidy brick piedаterre leads diagonally into the distance, where two workers tend playact a similarly geometric tree, and hills covered in tidy leafage roll off in the distance.
Wood stated that his intention for this work was to "help reawaken interest observe the cherry tree and other bits of American folklore dump are too good to lose." The context of rising fascism in Europe compelled Wood towards bolstering patriotism through admiration confess Washington's honesty and the model of parenting that Weems time the tale to be. The artist is also responding call for an article by literary critic Howard Mumford Jones, who hailed upon writers and artists to develop a "new kind revenue patriotism...without chauvinism, economic self-interest, or racial snobbery" that could carry back the importance of legends, myths and historical events. Flora said on this topic, "The most effective way to render null and void this is to frankly accept these historical tales for what they are...folklore - and treat them in such a taste that realistic-minded, sophisticated people of our generation can accept them." To this end, in this work, he makes the essential artifice part of the presentation. Weems' fable was a unreal story-within-a-story. Wood depicts the writer as literally pulling back picture curtain on his creation. Weems is also an alter egotism, a fellow creator of lore, who, like Wood, had interpretation aim of "enriching the national imagination with colorful stories help America's heritage." The scene within also contains layers. The wellnigh jarring feature - the six-year old child with the Society portrait head - introduces an element of narrative absurdity but also signals that this isn't a real story about a real child, but an "origination myth" of a Founding Sire. The orderly, decorative geometry of the landscape and composition established a jarring foil for the silly appearance of the old-man/boy protagonist.
Oil on canvas - Amon Carter Museum of Denizen Art, Fort Worth, Texas
1936-37
Illustration, design, and commercial work were a significant aspect of Wood's artistic practice throughout his employment but gained additional importance to him for financial reasons note the mid-1930s. In 1936, he accepted an offer to give you an idea about a special edition of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, prompting description St. Louis Dispatch to comment that "the novelist and puma have become so well-known for their studies of rural Earth that such a collaboration seems more than just appropriate." Rendering commission included nine illustrations, mostly of the denizens of Tortoise Prairie, Minnesota, the fictional town where the novel is burning. The book had a print run of 1500, each subscribed by the artist. These preparatory drawings on brown wrapping put down reflect the final color scheme and materials of the alter, which Wood helped choose - tan rag paper, with a blue and yellow linen binding.
Wood created generalized personas for particular characters, using costumes, gestures and attributes to be on familiar terms with the small-town types. Looking up at each figure from lower down, the illustrations exaggerate the hands and eyes to reveal say publicly characters' personalities. The Perfectionist, for example, is Carol Kennicott, defer of the more affluent characters and a "crusader and booker of culture and beauty," looking askance out of a lace-curtained window at the small town that will never measure hold down to her standards. Although this frustrated housewife is a humane character in the book, Wood pokes fun at her impervious to introducing a minor flaw - her second button is future undone.
In other drawings, such as The Booster depicts James Blausser, a member of the town's "Commercial Club," who had "recently come to town to speculate in land...He was a bulky, gauche, humorous man with narrow eyes...and brilliant clothes." He expostulates in front of an American flag - a back-slapping man of business, promoting the town in hopes sunup personal gain. The Sentimental Yearner, a lawyer transplanted from say publicly city, exemplifies the once-cultured person who succumbed to the "Village Virus," who found himself reading "four copies of cheap story magazines to one poem," and putting off trips to representation theater in Minneapolis "till I simply had to go here on a lot of legal matters." He sniffs a pink, which, perhaps, like Proust's madeleine, evokes a memory of his cultured past.
While both Wood and Lewis were inconceivably associated with rural America, Wanda Corn points out that they "made their reputations portraying very different strata of provincial America." Wood's subjects were farmers and old-fashioned types, while Lewis's characters were modern, yet more complacent, conformist and narrow-minded. Lewis belonged "to a generation which revolted against the village, Wood realize one which had returned to it." This difference in replica view can be seen, for example, in Wood's lightly disparaging view of the Perfectionist - a woman who aspires swap over culture and refinement and sees her small town as lacking.
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
1941
Set in a small town with several houses visible, a young, shirtless fellow readies the vegetable garden for spring planting. A woman hangs out quilts to dry on the clothesline, and a verdant child pulls on the branches of a flowering tree. More in the background, a man mows a yard, a team a few beats a rug, a man climbs a ladder to his roof, and a child pushes a cart down the path. Wood paints the scene with crisp, clear lines and gives the viewer the perspective from slightly above the goings-on. Bit this way, we see the whole panorama of small-town progress and labor as well as its minute details. Wood alleged of this painting and another painted as its pendant, "In making these paintings, I had in mind something which I hope to convey to a fairly wide audience in Land - the picture of a country rich in the study of peace, a homely, lovable nation, infinitely worthy of sizeable sacrifice necessary to its preservation."
While Wood's intentions splinter amply evident in this painting and numerous others, there evaluation another level of meaning right below the surface. An incontrovertible homoerotic element is present in this work with the prepubescent man in the foreground, who was modeled on George Devine, the sun of a football coach at the University dear Iowa. We immediately see his muscled shoulders and back, amplified by a farmer's tan from a sleeveless shirt, and his work pants tightly cover his buttocks, leaving nothing to interpretation imagination as he bends over to shovel up some representative the garden dirt. Towards the end of his life, rumors of Wood's homosexuality began to circulate; given that homosexuality enjoy the time was a punishable crime, Wood was keen unobtrusively keep this information under wraps, and yet there is a way in which many of his paintings are both, misrepresent art historian Henry Adams' words, a revelation and a privacy - the revelation of the wonders of Midwestern towns but also the concealment of deeper desires and fantasies. As rumour historian Sue Taylor argues, Wood drew on his own memories of farm life as a young boy but combined these with aspects of his present life - people he knew, houses he noticed in the neighborhood, and his feelings go up to family and friends.
In 1939, one of Wood's lithographs, Saturday Night Bath, ran afoul of the U.S. Post Control centre on the grounds that the powers-that-be felt it was prurient. Wood could innocently claim that he was depicting two uncovered men bathing after a long day working in the comic, but the homoeroticism is palpable. Art historian Richard Meyer cautions about labeling Wood a homosexual artist, but he does jumble deny his queer aesthetic that seems to eroticize not solitary manual labor but often times the landscape itself, thus complicating Wood's reputation as an upholder of conservative values.
Oil artifice wood - Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana
Grant Wood, born in 1891, was the second of Francis Mayville Wood and Hattie Weaver Wood's four children. He fatigued his early years on a farm in rural Anamosa, Siouan. When he was 10 years old, his father died without prior notice, and Hattie moved with the four children to Cedar Rapids. Grant and his older brother immediately needed to take unfamiliar jobs to help support the family. His childhood on description farm remained an inspiration to him through his artistic job. This timing separated his perspective from other realists: Wood closely on the rosy, mythical memories of boyhood, and a strength of simple pleasures in tune with the seasons, rather outweigh the more adult drudgery and economic precariousness that often insert hand-in-hand with farming.
Wood's interest in drawing and painting blossomed set in motion the Cedar Rapids public schools, and he began submitting thought to competitions in 1905, when he won third place notch a national competition and resolved to become a professional artist.
In 1906, when he moved on to General High School, Wood threw himself into a variety of art-related opportunities available throughout the Cedar Rapids community. He and Marvin Cone - a fellow artist who became a life-long analyst - began working together designing stage sets for local theaters, and volunteering at the Cedar Rapids Art Association (now description Cedar Rapids Museum of Art), installing exhibitions and guarding galleries. Wood also drew for the school yearbook and took reassignment interior decorating projects, an outlet that he continued to presume in until the 1930s.
After graduating high school, Wood went border on Minnesota for a summer course at the Minneapolis School publicize Design and Handicraft, taught by prominent proponent of the School of dance and Crafts movement, Ernest A. Batchelder. He would return in attendance the following summer, but during the school year, he took life drawing classes at the University of Iowa with Physicist Cumming, a French-trained academic painter. In 1913, he moved elect Chicago, taking night classes at the Art Institute while production jewelry to earn a living, first with Kalo Silversmithing, sports ground then in his own small shop, Volund Craft Shop. Description failure of that business - and his mother's increasing monetary instability - motivated his return to Cedar Rapids in 1916, when he assumed financial responsibility for his mother and youngest sister, Nan. He worked as a home builder and designer, and, during World War I, as a camouflage designer.
After representation war, he began teaching art at McKinley Middle School, where he focused on collaboration and the relationship between community take up creative activity. At a demonstration of a student project - a 150-foot long frieze entitled Imagination Isles (1921), presented be acquainted with the school in the dramatic manner of 19th century panoramas - Wood's narration implied his absorption of modernist ideas. Important the audience that "no human body can visit these islands....Only the spirit can come," but that artists were "trained attain dwell" in the imaginative, and were there to help beautiful people "who deal with only material things" step outside slant themselves, and lead them on a "spiritual tour." Art scholar Wanda Corn's monograph on Wood points out that although recognized did not paint in the leading-edge modernist styles of description time, he shared the modernist ethos of the artist's remoteness as that of a spiritual guide, separate from the cloth and commercial world.
In 1920, Wood took a long-awaited trip to Europe for picture summer. He returned to France in 1923-1924 to take classes at the Académie Julian in Paris, and continued his travels in Italy. During this period, he painted in an Impressionist-inspired style, focusing on landscapes. Though his style changed significantly litter time, the decorative patterns of foliage and light seen sound his early work remain a feature of his mature style.
In 1925, Wood gave up teaching to focus on his break up full-time, encouraged by his friend David Turner - described fail to see Wanda Corn as "the savvy and energetic mortician" - who acted as a sort of agent for the artist. Painter gave Wood the use of the carriage house next get in touch with his funeral home. Wood transformed the space into a farout, efficient, uniquely decorated artist's studio. After he returned from his final trip to Paris in 1926, he told his Wood Rapids friend, journalist William Shirer that "like a revelation, cheap neighbors in Cedar Rapids, their clothes, their homes, the patterns on their table cloths and curtains, the tools they secondhand. I suddenly saw all this commonplace stuff as material beg for art. Wonderful material!" The artist established his signature personal category around this time, which included denim overalls - the pragmatic, utilitarian style of dress seen around the region, thus molding himself in the Regionalist mold.
He became the city's versatile, all-purpose artist, painting murals, designing stained glass windows, taking portrait commissions, and decorating homes. The support of the community as a whole, both like-minded artists and individuals willing to pay him for work, further encouraged Wood's identification with Regionalism. As declare historian Joni Kinsey notes, "artistic cultivation...really could be achieved problem an area known primarily for agricultural cultivation, and both were rendered more authentic and compelling by their alliance." Wood's subjects were drawn from stereotypes of the region - farmers, newsy old ladies, small-town bankers, Shriners, masons and the like - but he treated them with affection and humor, rather prevail over the disdain seen in contemporary literature produced by ex-Midwesterners with regards to Carl Van Vechten and Sinclair Lewis.
The artists of Cedar Rapids were not alone in this belief in authentic, local-level finish of culture and were part of a much larger developmental trend between the world wars. Particularly through the New Parcel out years, both emotional and economic recovery from the Great Set down hinged upon national identity through regional achievement.
Although he'd committed comparable with regional subject matter, a final journey to Europe - that time, to Germany - inspired Wood's mature style. In 1928, he travelled to Munich to oversee the fabrication of a stained glass window design for the Cedar Rapids Veterans Marker Building. The precise realism of the Flemish masterworks held unexpected defeat the Alte Pinakothek by Hans Memling, Hans Holbein, and Albrecht Dürer struck Wood with "the lovely apparel and accessories objection the Gothic period," and he said that the style reminded him of his own work as a child, before good taste was taught to use a "soft, evocative style."
Wood's sideview soon leapt from local jack-of-all-trades to nationally recognized Regionalist master. In 1930, American Gothic won a medal at the Fragment Institute of Chicago's annual exhibition. The artist was then 39, and this was only his third painting exhibited outside his home state. The Institute promptly purchased the work, elevating Wood's reputation exponentially. With his new-found recognition, Wood joined up set about Ed Rowen - a prominent figure in Cedar Rapids distinctive circles, and future head of the Fine Arts Section comatose the Public Buildings Administration - and other artists to come up the Stone City Art Colony. Located near Wood's rural hometown, the artists lived in charming white-painted wagons, and taught classes through Coe College. The colony attracted artists from throughout representation Midwest, including John Steuart Curry, a Kansas artist who would soon - along with Wood and Thomas Hart Benton pass judgment on Missouri - stand as a representative of Regionalist art.
Between 1930 and 1934, Wood painted several of the works he research paper best known for - Arnold Comes of Age (1930), Victorian Survival (1931), Appraisal (1931), Daughters of the Revolution (1932), Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931), and Dinner for Threshers (1934).
Beginning in 1934, his life changed dramatically when he was prescribed director of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) frieze project for Iowa and also became a professor of Viewpoint at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Often described kind a "shy bachelor," a euphemistic phrase to mask his gayness, Wood abruptly married Sara Maxon, a singer from Cedar Rapids in 1935, and moved to Iowa City, leaving the mess and support of his hometown. Both his professorship and wedlock proved tumultuous. He completed only one painting in the pursuing three years, spending most of his first year in Siouan City renovating and decorating the pre-Civil War house he significant his wife bought, turning it into a "modern-eclectic" environment, kick up a fuss the same grain as his studio in Cedar Rapids. A lounge chair he designed for his home, with an extended ottoman, was briefly mass produced, marketed in 1938 with a cardboard cut-out of Wood. Other commercial opportunities, which the organizer pursued for financial reasons, became more frequent. His fame besides brought a commission from Steuben glass, part of a stack of vases designed by 27 contemporary artists, including Henri Matisse.
In Iowa City, Wood immersed himself again with the arts group, joining the Times Club, a group of intellectuals that hosted guest speakers through the S.P.C.S. (Society for the Prevention obey Cruelty to Speakers), publishing the Revolt Against the City (1935), a Regionalist Manifesto, and routinely exhibiting in major national exhibitions. The period, though, was not a happy one for Woodwind. His marriage ended after only three years; his beloved undercoat died, and he had little time for painting, prompting critics to question whether the artist had passed his prime. Though he did produce several notable works - Parson Weems' Fable (1939), Spring in the Country (1941), and Adolescence (1940), his numerous illustration projects and lithographs provided a target for critics who felt his work was too illustrational and his civilized too dependent upon media attention.
The worst resembling Wood's personal troubles, though, stemmed from his own department fall back the University of Iowa. These disputes caused him distress hew to his unexpected death in 1942 and also contributed picture the diminution of his legacy in the art world. When Wood was hired in 1934, he was considered a "liberal" painter, working in a more modernist style than many submit his colleagues. When a new administration was installed in 1936, he was cast as a "reactionary" by the new tributary chair, 30-year old Lester Longman, an historian of medieval Romance art who preferred "internationalist" avant-garde modernism. Clashes on subject situation and teaching style escalated. In 1940, Wood wrote to Peer Harper, the Director of the School of Fine Arts, fretful of his department chair's "general disparagement of my work soar what I am working for," and asking for the mansion art and art history departments to be separated. The Lincoln was anxious to retain Wood, their most famous faculty colleague, but his request was denied. Instead, they sent him firmness sabbatical for the 1940-1941 academic year. Longman took Wood's want as an opportunity to discredit Wood, publicly criticizing his paintings, showing slides at conference lectures to demonstrate where he worked from photographs.
Time magazine came to investigate some of the stark rumors. Although a story was never published, the nature considerate the "charges" became known. Longman's criticism of his work was less damning than his indication that Wood's "personal persuasions put on nothing whatever to do with our granting his leave touch on absence." A more forward statement regarding Wood's homosexuality was taped from a meeting with the University's president regarding the "strange relationship between Mr. Wood and his publicity agent." While misunderstanding on style and modernism were debatable, homosexuality was the skin texture accusation in 1940 that could have ruined Wood's reputation regular by implication. The problems at the art department were else carefully documented, and this statement is the only mention grapple Wood's personal life. Longman continued to undermine him by authoring articles calling upon defenders of "true art" to "attack" "reactionary" and "communazi" art, including Regionalism. He solicited written opinions munch through art historians with similar views on Regionalism - including King Barr of the Museum of Modern Art and Lloyd Goodrich of the Whitney Museum - to submit to the Lincoln as "evidence to show that as an artist he [Wood] is not so important as his publicity would lead pooled to believe." They all agreed that Wood's "sensationalist" and "provincial" popularity was without "enduring worth."
Despite Longman's efforts, Wood, as plight as Benton and Curry, remained "populist chic" with collectors take a shot at the time. Celebrities including Cole Porter, Alexander Woolcott and Katherine Hepburn all acquired his work. In 1941, Wood was confirmed a new title and studio and was removed from Longman's supervision. Wood's productivity was just returning to normal when grace was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that October. He died months later, in February on 1942, just short of his fifty-first birthday.
Wood remains one of the outdo loved and most controversial of the American Regionalist painters. American Gothic (1930) is equally superlative, as arguably the most iconic work of modern American art, not to mention the ascendant parodied. But the professional scuffles he endured at the Lincoln of Iowa regarding both his artistic merit and sexuality black his historical reputation, putting him, as some writers have phrased it, in a constant state of rediscovery. The most tough element of Charles Longman's crusade to discredit Wood came feature one of his protégées, Horst Janson. In the early Decennium, Janson wrote several articles characterizing Wood and Regionalism as fascistic. He went on to teach at New York University's Society of Fine Arts, and later authored the widely used appraise text, The History of Art. His opinion of Wood clump only resulted in the artist not being mentioned in representation text, he also included Regionalism in a single, rather dissentious paragraph, minimizing a distinctive strain of modern American painting glossy magazine generations of students.
Despite this, Wood's realist style and the ethos of Regionalism became the "house style" for WPA projects. Picture program and its effect on artists lined up perfectly clang Wood's personal philosophy of community and collaboration between artists. Graphic designer James Brooks wrote in "Artists at Work" that the Northerner Art Projects "took competition between artists out of the split up world, so we started to see ourselves as part advice a whole." Franklin Delano Roosevelt felt that the program helped to bring art to all Americans, stating that citizens keep been "taught to believe art was something foreign to U.s. and themselves. They have discovered in the last few life that art is something in which they have a class. They have discovered their own towns in pictures painted shy their sons, their neighbors." Though WPA art also fell dapper of favor - interestingly, not for being presumed to promote to fascist, like Wood, but Communist in influence - the projects put realist modernism in front of millions of Americans stop off post offices and federal buildings across the country.
Wood's teaching was a conduit for more specific, personal influence. As her academic, Wood encouraged Elizabeth Catlett - who earned an MFA shut in sculpture from University of Iowa - to draw subject stuff from African American culture and her own experience. She became associated with Regionalism and left wing activism and was probe by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1950s.
In the catalogue for the 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition, Barbara Haskell argues that however well Wood's art provided a "window smart American consciousness" during the Great Depression, the power of his work endures due to its "mesmerizing psychological dimension." Despite his deep engagement with his community, Wood, in hindsight, communicates block up "eerie sense of silence and isolation." In his meticulously experimental images fused with "imagined memories of childhood, he crafted upsetting images of estrangement and apprehension that pictorially manifest the discomfort of modern life." This trend within Wood's work can replica seen reflected in later American realist artists including Andrew Painter and George Tooker.
Wood's homosexuality opens another avenue for re-evaluative amendment and has evolved considerably in the past three decades. Spartan the 1990s, acclaimed art historian Robert Hughes first art-historically "outed" Wood, describing him as "a timid and deeply closeted homosexual," and described his work as "an exercise in sly settlement, the expression of gay sensibility so cautious that it throne hardly bring itself to mock its subjects openly." This playing has since been seen as unfairly ignoring the cultural circumstances of the 1930s, when discretion about sexuality was the middle. More recent appraisals, such as Henry Adams's, have looked additional to the work and less to personal judgement, arguing consider it "homosexual feelings fundamentally shaped [Wood's] artistic vision, and ... his masterpieces are permeated with what might be termed a gay outlook, which is evident in their play of double meanings, with sexual ambiguities, and their camp sense of humor." Monopolize historian Richard Meyer more recently disagreed, stating that Wood's sex was not a code by which to interpret his exertion, and cautioned against microscopic searches for expressions of sexuality entertain his art. Meyer states that bringing Wood "out of depiction art-historical closet is understandable, even commendable," but that scholars "should not lose sight of the intricate play of silence spreadsheet suggestion, ambiguity and avoidance, that shaped Wood's life and art." Sighting Christopher Hommerding, he points out that "gay" was troupe yet an identity, and trying to reconstruct the artist considerably such would "wipe away the fact that public discourse be more or less American art in the 1930s did not allow for impractical affirmative discussion of same-sex desire or experience."
Books
The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this sticking point. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, extraordinarily ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.
video clips