Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables
Grant Wood’s American Gothic—the double portrait of a pitchfork-wielding farmer and a woman commonly presumed to be his wife—is perhaps the most recognizable painting in 20th century American art, an indelible icon of Americana, and certainly Wood’s most famous artwork.
But Wood’s career consists of far more than one single painting. Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables brings together the full range of his art, from his early Arts and Crafts decorative objects and Impressionist oils through his mature paintings, murals, and book illustrations.
On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St., New York, NY, from March 2nd thru June 10th, 2018.
The exhibition reveals a complex, sophisticated artist whose image as a farmer-painter was as mythical as the fables he depicted in his art. Wood sought pictorially to fashion a world of harmony and prosperity that would answer America’s need for reassurance at a time of economic and social upheaval occasioned by the Depression.
Early Career
Grant Wood began his career as a decorative artist. Even after he shifted to fine arts, he retained the ideology and pictorial vocabulary of Arts and Crafts, a movement that promoted simplicity of design and truth to materials. To it, he owed his later use of flat, decorative patterns and sinuous, intertwined organic forms as well as his belief that art was a democratic enterprise that must be accessible to the average person, not just the elite.
Van Antwerp Place, by Grant Wood, 1922-23, oil on composition board, 12¼ x 14⅛ inches, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Iowa
Like many American artists of his generation, Grant Wood initially looked to Europe as the center of culture. He went abroad four times between 1920 and 1928 for a total of twenty-three months, primarily studying the work of the French Impressionists, whose loose brushwork he adopted in the first two decades of his career to paint what he later called “Europy-looking” subjects. By the early 1920s, he had become the leading artist, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, selling his paintings to its residents and executing commissions in a variety of styles according to each project’s needs.
Portraits
By the late 1920s, Grant Wood had come to believe that the emergence of a rich American culture depended on artists breaking free of European influence and expressing the specific character of their own regions. For him, it was Iowa, whose rolling hills and harvested cornfields served as the background for his earliest mature portraits, those of his mother and Arnold Pyle.
American Gothic, by Grant Wood, 1930, oil on composition board, 30¾ x 25¾ inches, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
In Europe, he had admired Northern Renaissance painting by artists such as Hans Memling and Albrecht Dürer. By the time he painted American Gothic in 1930, he had concluded that the hard-edge precision and meticulous detail in their art could be used to convey a distinctly American quality, especially suggestive of the Midwest. Joined with Iowan subject matter, it became the basis of his signature style. Premiering at the Art Institute of Chicago in October 1930, this painting captivated the public’s imagination and catapulted Wood into the national spotlight overnight.
Appraisal, by Grant Wood, 1931, oil on composition board, 29½ x 35¼ inches, Carnegie-Stout Public Library, Dubuque, Iowa; on long-term loan to the Dubuque Museum of Art, Iowa
Wood felt that all painting, portraiture included, must suggest a narrative in order to engender the emotional and psychological engagement he associated with successful literature. Consequently, he included images that hinted at the life and character of the depicted subject, taking care to avoid anecdotal illustration by painting archetypes rather than individuals. He left the “props” in his portraits intentionally ambiguous, making the stories they intimate so enigmatic that they defy ready explanation
Grant Wood’s working process was methodical. He made full-scale drawings of each of his paintings and lithographs before beginning to execute them in their final medium. In creating his figurative images, he worked from photographs and live models—often his friends. For his landscapes, he utilized a system called the principle of thirds, which called for drawing a grid of nine squares on top of a composition and adjusting the important visual elements so that they fell at the intersection of the grid’s horizontal and vertical lines.
Landscapes
In his early landscapes, Grant Wood recast the farmscape of his childhood into an Arcadian fantasy of undulating, swollen shapes and decorative embellishments whose multiple focal points keep the viewer’s eye in constant motion by giving all parts of the composition equal weight.
Young Corn, by Grant Wood, 1931, oil on composition board, 24 x 29⅞ inches, Cedar Rapids Community School District, Iowa; on loan to the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Iowa A detail of this painting was used for the Iowa Sesquicentennial Stamp
Grant Wood’s landscapes do not depict Midwestern farm life in the 1930s. Instead, they portray his idealized memories of the 1890s farm in Anamosa, Iowa, where he lived as a young boy before moving to Cedar Rapids with his family following the death of his father. His desire was not so much to portray a world that was becoming extinct as to recover a mythical childhood that existed only in his imagination.
Late Work
By 1935, Grant Wood began to streamline his landscape style, replacing the ornamental frills and mannerisms of his earlier work with broad, reductive shapes. He retained this stylistic simplification as he shifted to more patriotic subject matter in response to his worry that America had lost its will to defend itself against fascism, which was on the rise in Europe.
January, by Grant Wood, 1940-41, oil on composition board, 17⅞ x 23⅝ inches, Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
Faced with Nazi victories over the Allies in the first years of World War II, Wood turned his attention to depicting what he called the “simple, everyday things that make life significant to the average person” in order to awaken the country to what it stood to lose. He completed only two works in this second series—Spring in the Country and Spring in Town—before his death from pancreatic cancer on February 2, 1942, two hours before he would have turned fifty-one.
Spring in Town, by Grant Wood, 1941, oil on wood, 26 x 24½ inches, Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana
Exhibition Catalogue and More
Exploring Wood’s oeuvre from a variety of perspectives, the catalogue presents the artist’s work in all of its subtle complexity and eschews the idea that Wood can be categorized simply as a Regionalist painter.
To view additional images and videos, listen to an audio guide or purchase this comprehensive study of Grant Wood, visit the Whitney’s website for this important exhibition.
About the Whitney Museum of American Art
As the preeminent institution devoted to the art of the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. The Whitney is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting American art, and its collection—arguably the finest holding of twentieth-century American art in the world—is the Museum’s key resource. The Museum’s signature exhibition, the Biennial, is the country’s leading survey of the most recent developments in American art.
Such figures as Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Cindy Sherman were given their first museum retrospectives by the Whitney. The Museum has consistently purchased works within the year they were created, often well before the artists became broadly recognized.
The Whitney’s new building at 99 Gansevoort Street opened on May 1, 2015.
Designed by architect Renzo Piano and situated between the High Line and the Hudson River, the Whitney’s new building vastly increases the Museum’s exhibition and programming space, providing the most expansive view ever of its unsurpassed collection of modern and contemporary American art.
Read about the fascinating history of the Whitney’s founding by sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1930 here.
