Grant Wood

Grant Wood, “Spring in Town”, 1941, Oil on Wood Panel, 66 x 60.9 cm, Swope Art Museum, Terra Haute, Indiana

Born in February of 1891 near Anamosa, Iowa, painter Grant Wood was one of the major exponents of Midwestern Regionalism, an art movement that flourished during the 1930s. His adolescent years on the family farm remained an inspiration to him throughout his artistic career. In his early years, Wood studied under tile-craftsman Ernest A. Batchelder and took drawing classes under painter Charles Cumming at the University of Iowa. In 1913, he moved to Chicago to study at the Art Institute until the death of his father in 1916; at which time, Wood returned home to Cedar Rapids to support his mother and sister.

Wood traveled to France in 1923, where he studied for two years at the Académie Julian in Paris. He then continued his European travels, staying in Italy for a period to paint. During this period, Wood painted in an Impressionist-inspired style, focusing on landscapes. Though his style changed significantly over time, the decorative patterns of foliage and light seen in his early work remained a feature of his mature style. Encouraged in 1925 by his friend David Turner, Wood gave up teaching to focus full-time on his art, setting up a studio space, furnished by Turner, in Cedar Rapids.

It was in this developmental time, through the support of the Cedar Rapids community and his exposure to its culture, that he became committed to Regionalism, drawing the subjects of his work from the local population and landscapes of the region. Wood’s distinctive style was finalized after a trip to Munich in 1928, where he oversaw the fabrication of his stained glass window design for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. By 1929, after having viewed painter Hans Memling’s canvases and painter-printmaker Albrecht Dürer’s work in Munich’s museums, Wood came to believe the crisp edges and meticulous details of their execution could be used to convey a distinctly American quality.

In Iowa City in the spring of 1941, with war overseas and anxiety growing at home, Grant Wood began his sketch work for “Spring in Town”, which he finished that summer along with its companion piece “Spring in the Country”. He painted the scene with crisp, clear lines and gave the scene a perspective from slightly above: this enabled the viewer to see the whole panorama of small-town life and labor as well as its minute details. Wood drew from his own memories of farm life as a young boy but combined these with aspects of his present life, the houses he noticed, the people he knew, and his feelings about family and friends.

“Spring in Town” was one of Grant Wood’s last midwestern rural scenes before his death in February of 1942. After the United States entered World War II, the Saturday Evening Post magazine printed “Spring in Town” as patriotic propaganda, presenting the idyllic scene as the exemplar of American life. The painting, however, although manifestly tranquil, represented a traumatic personal memory- the death of Wood’s father and, as a result, the loss of the family’s Anamosa farm. Wood’s first conception of the “Spring in Town” image coincided with the fortieth anniversary of his father’s death on March 17, 1901.

Top Insert Image: Grant Wood’s “Self Portrait” was reworked several times by the artist, beginning in 1932, but was never finalized. This last version of the enigmatic artist was uncompleted at his death. It is in the Davenport Collection of the Figge Art Museum located in Davenport, Iowa.

Second Insert Image: Grant Wood’s 1937 “Saturday Night Bath” is a charcoal drawing on wove paper which is in the collection of Houston’s Museum of Fine Art. In 1939, the image, reproduced as a lithograph, was considered by the U. S. Post Office to be pornographic due to the depictions of the two naked men.

Bottom Insert Image: Grant Wood, “Plowing on Sunday”, 1934, Black Conté Crayon, Ink, Colored Pencil and Gouache on Brown Wove Paper, 45.7 x 43.5 cm, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island

Grant Wood

Grant Wood, “Arnold Comes of Age (Portrait of Arnold Pyle)”, 1930, Oil on Composition Board, 27 x 23 Inches, Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska

Grant Wood’s 1930 oil-on-board “Arnold Comes of Age” was painted the same year as “American Gothic”. The painting is a portrait of Arnold Pyle, who was a student of Grant Wood’s when he was teaching middle school in Cedar Rapids; and then after graduation, Pyle became Wood’s studio assistant. It presents a subtle commentary on homoerotic desire and memory, as Arnold Pyle, caught in a rigid Renaissance-portrait pose, is set against a Midwestern riverside background.

When Wood’s assistant, Arnold Pyle, turned twenty-one, the artist decided to commemorate the event with a portrait. The attributes–the river of life, the cornsheaths, the butterfly at Arnold’s elbow–are obvious in the painting and Arnold’s expression, facing down adulthood, seems to reflect what Wood himself must have felt in his earlier years. Wood’s clear affection for his subject and empathy for Arnold’s difficult age endow the painting with unexpected life and appeal; like the other portraits, “Arnold Comes of Age” provides an idea of what did engage Grant Wood’s sincerest emotion.

Grant Wood

Grant Wood, “The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa”, Oil on Composition Board, 1931, The John R. Van Derlip Fund; owned jointly with the Des Moines Art Center

Wood places the viewer at the crest of a steep hill, looking down into a green valley where a tour guide points to a small cottage beside a larger white house. But this is not an ordinary cottage – it is the place where Herbert Hoover was born.

Typical of Grant Wood’s Regionalist style, everything is neat and regimented, evoking the simplified forms of American folk art. Many tiny straight brushstrokes define the trim lawns, creating a rhythmic pattern across much of the painting, and patterned clumps of enormous autumnal leaves define the trees. Unrealistically, all of the forms, whether close or distant, are bathed in the same clear light and described with the same precise detail.

Wood did not re-create the scene as it may have looked at the president’s birth. Instead he painted it as the tourist attraction it had become. Upon Hoover’s election to the presidency, the ordinary cottage, which had been turned into a kitchen by later owners, began to attract visitors from all over the country. The owner of the cottage charged visitors ten cents for tours of it and set up a souvenir stand. Wood included a sign in front of the house and a pink rock in which the Daughters of the American Revolution had placed a plaque identifying the house as Hoover’s birthplace.