Grant Wood
(1892-1942)
Grant Wood, an American painter, was a leader in the art
movement known as Regionalism, which also included the artist Thomas Hart
Benton. Wood was born in Iowa and lived mainly in Cedar Rapids. He visited
Europe repeatedly from an early age and studied at the Academie Julian in
Paris in 1933. Still, he was mainly self-taught as an artist: he worked as
a camouflage painter during World War One, an interior decorator, and a
metalworker. His early paintings were strongly influenced by French
Impressionism. In 1928, having been commissioned to make stained-glass
windows for the Cedar Rapids Veterans Memorial Building, he traveled to
Munich to supervise the windows' production; there he encountered early
Dutch painting, and was inspired to give up Impressionism in favor of his
characteristic mature style. Under the influence of Memling and other
early Netherlandish masters, Wood began painting with close attention to
sharp, crisp detail. In the Regionalist aesthetic, the everyday lives of
working people are the highest subjects of art; modern ideas of
abstraction are often considered elitist and decadent. Wood therefore
mainly depicted scenes of everyday Midwestern life in a fresh and
sometimes stark manner. His best-known work, American Gothic (1930), won a
bronze medal at an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, but it
caused controversy among some of the very people it was intended to
depict, who interpreted the painting as broad, insensitive caricature. In
the decades since, however, the work has become one of the most enduring
images in American art. Wood painted many landscapes, as well as other
scenes and portraits, including The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931)
and a genuinely satirical work, Daughters of the Revolution (1932). He
supervised Federal Art Projects in Iowa and was assistant professor of
fine arts at the University of Iowa.
